scholarly journals NEEDLEWORK AS POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVEL

HOMEROS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nesrin YAVAŞ

Handcrafts like quilting, knitting, sewing, and cross-stitching have traditionally been viewed as a “woman’s thing,” a gendered leisure time activity. However, women’s handcrafts when read as texts can yield multi-layered narratives. With the coming of the second wave feminism in the US in the 1960s, many feminist scholars, critiques turned to study literary texts in which women’s handcrafts yielded political and/or cultural meanings. In fact, there is a bulk of scholarly literature on the representations of needlework in American literary tradition. The aim of this research paper is not to offer a comprehensive study on the representations of women’s handcrafts in American literary tradition but to bring attention to three contemporary American novels, Mama Day by African American feminist author Gloria Naylor, Four Souls by Native American Louise Erdrich, and Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. the study of which, I believe, will bring a new breath to the already existing scholarship on the topic.

Author(s):  
Sean Teuton

‘The Native novel’ outlines the first Native American novels— John Rollin Ridge’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) and Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891). It then goes on to describe the novels of Cherokee writer John Milton Oskison, Osage writer John Joseph Mathews, Salish writer D’Arcy McNickle, and Mourning Dove as well as the Red Power writing of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the first two novels, Native writers have used the form to test various responses to North American colonialism, from violent resistance to passive acceptance. The Native American novelist seeks to mediate, often subversively, between the “novel of resistance” and the “novel of assimilation.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
LaNada War Jack

The author reflects on her personal experience as a Native American at UC Berkeley in the 1960s as well as on her activism and important leadership roles in the 1969 Third World Liberation Front student strike, which had as its goal the creation of an interdisciplinary Third World College at the university.


2021 ◽  
Vol VI (I) ◽  
pp. 48-56
Author(s):  
Mumtaz Ahmad ◽  
Nighat Ahmad ◽  
Amara Javed

This article, evaluating the usefulness and applicability of the ecofeminist tenets upon the environmental fiction of Erdrich and Morrison, creates a new understanding of the preservation of the environment for engendering a more egalitarian relationship between humanity and nature. It presents the critique of the ways Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich engage with the environmental themes and motifs using the historical connections of their communities with nature as a reference point via eco-performative texts. The overall scheme of the article, therefore, denies the anthropocentric approach upheld by the Euro-American world towards the environment and glorifies the biocentric approach revered and celebrated by the Native American and AfroAmerican lifestyle, emphasizing that in the cosmic scheme of nature, not just humans but non-humans, nature and environment are equal partners. The study concludes that Morrison and Erdrich have stressed in their fiction the ecocritical recognition of the inevitable interdependence of man and nature. Their fiction asserts that considering environmental issues to be human issues can positively affect the human attitude towards nature/environment.


Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-411
Author(s):  
Josh Garrett-Davis

American Indian Soundchiefs, an independent record label founded by the Rev. Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) in the 1940s, developed a remarkable model of Indigenous sound media that combined home recording, dubbing, and small-scale mass production. Alongside other Native American media producers of the same era, Soundchiefs built on earlier engagements with ethnographic and commercial recording to produce Native citizens’ media a generation prior to the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. This soundwork provided Native music to Native listeners first, while also seeking to preserve a “rich store of folk-lore” sometimes in danger of being lost under ongoing colonial pressures. Pauahty’s label found ways to market commercial recordings while operating within what music and legal scholar Trevor Reed (Hopi) calls “Indigenous sonic networks,” fields of obligation and responsibility.


PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 698-701
Author(s):  
Anadeli Bencomo

Carlos Fuentes, like many other writers of the Boom, discussed his peers' unprecedented renovation of Latin American narrative forms—specifically, the novel (e.g., Donoso; Vargas Llosa). In La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; “The New Spanish American Novel”), Fuentes reviews the most influential novels of the 1960s after presenting some of the founders of the literary modernity that preceded the Boom: Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. Fuentes focuses on the Boom's protagonists—Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar—to highlight his ideas about the groundbreaking contributions of these novels.


Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell

Chapter 3 explores instances of “sentimental diplomacy” in the literary aftermath of the US–Mexican War and Indian Removal. It opens by arguing that the heroines of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—who seek to counter the violence and dispossession of late-nineteenth-century Californios—stand as unrecognized heirs to the women in John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel of Mexican banditry, Joaquín Murieta. Amidst the sensational violence of Joaquín Murieta, the first Native American novel, Mexican and Anglo-American women engage in a sentimental diplomacy that resists rampant racialized violence. In both The Squatter and the Don and Joaquín Murieta, sentimental diplomacy offers local possibilities for peace, but in neither novel can it overcome the war’s brutal legacy or the racism and systemic corruption that followed.


Native American oral literature, such as that of the Cherokee, is Appalachia’s earliest literary tradition. The Cherokee themselves date their arrival in southern Appalachia to several thousand years ago, and some Cherokee origination stories state that the people have always lived here. The Cherokee language is part of the Algonquian language family, which may explain the parallels between Cherokee creation accounts and those of the Iroquois and Ojibwe in the Northeast....


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-336
Author(s):  
Steen Bille Jørgensen

In French 1960s’ literature, the strategy of re-writing is associated with the New Novel and the ideological Tel Quel movement. However, a more ironical poetics of the novel can be found in Blanche ou l'oubli (1967) by Louis Aragon1 and Les Choses (1967) by Georges Perec.2 Both novels are rewritings of Gustave Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, with particular attention to that novel's main theme of ‘illusion’. The interesting question then is how literary tradition becomes a part of the meta-fictional interrogation of human experience in a particular historical context. Perec uses the rhythm of Flaubert's sentences to draw attention to the story as a construction and to his characters’ lack of significance. Aragon foregrounds the novel's capacity of holding on to experience as such, with autobiography (Flaubert's as well as his own) linked to materialistic-historical conditions. Ultimately, in following the writer's reading of the historical work, the reader must seek what literature offers him or her the opportunity to apprehend his/her own conditions for experience.


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