GENEVA NATIVE STUDIES MASTERCLASS, 2009

PROGRAM

LOCATION: Room 206, Aile Jura, University of Geneva

10am welcome

10.15-11.15 Gerald Vizenor

11.15-11.45 Discussion

12-13.30 LUNCH

13.45-14.30 Ewelina Banka

14.30-15.15 Joanna Ziarkowska

COFFEE

15.45-16.30 David Harding

16.30-17.15 Sharon Holm

17.15-17.45 Discussion

PARTICIPANTS

Ewelina Bańka,
Ph.D. Candidate / Department of English,
University of Lublin, Poland

David Harding,
Foreign Lecturer (Udenlandsk Lektor) / Department of English,
Aarhus University, Denmark

Sharon Holm,
Lecturer / School of English and Humanities,
Birkbeck College, University of London

Joanna Ziarkowska,
Assistant Professor / Institute of English Studies, Department of American Literature, Warsaw University, Poland

PARTICIPANT INFORMATION

Ewelina Bańka
University of Lublin, Poland

Project Summary

“View From the City Shore: Identity and Urban Space in Contemporary Native American Literature”

The aim of this project is to analyze the significant changes in the rendering of urban space as well as the search for new urban identities in the selected novels and short story collections by the contemporary Native American writers – N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor and Sherman Alexie. These four authors demonstrate in their work how the concepts of Native land, community, and the relationship between one’s sense of self and a sense of place are modified when seen from urban Indian perspectives.

Presented as a tool of acculturation and assimilation, as well as a locus of dehumanizing forces, the city was seen for years as a place that ultimately suppressed Indian identity. Several Native American Renaissance authors envisioned the city as a wasteland to reinforce criticism of contemporary life in urban America. Today’s body of Native American writing demonstrates that over the course of time many authors have consistently denied the absence of Indian people in urban spaces and resisted the image of displaced Indians victimized in the city. Placing Native American writing within the postcolonial framework, I will demonstrate that literary urban landscape has been reimagined as a neocolonial contact zone. The city becomes a place that defines and validates contemporary indigenous identity. Strengthening the link between ancestral and modern storytelling traditions, Native American writing concerned with urban Indian experience constitutes a creative response and a form of resistance to the neocolonial forces of Western civilization. It has become an instrumental tool for the reconstruction of Native space as well as indigenous identities and communities. Remapped anew through artistic practice, urban Indian Country represents emerging discursive space resisting the colonial concept of territory and geographic confinement imposed by the settler society.

Biography

Ewelina Banka is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. She earned her M.A. from the department in 2003, for a thesis entitled “Representations of Feminine Strength in the Novels by Louise Erdrich.” Currently she is at work on her doctoral dissertation about the imaginative and symbolic representations of urban space as well as the search for new identities in contemporary Native American literature. In 2007, she received a research scholarship from the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin. In 2008, she was awarded a grant from the Kosciuszko Foundation, an American Center for Polish Culture, to conduct research at Arizona State University Library, Tempe, Arizona. She has participated in a number of local and international conferences on American literature and culture.

David Harding
Aarhus University, Denmark

Project Summary

“The Control of Identity Discourse in the De-establishment/Re-establishment of Native American/First Nations Peoples Sovereignty”

I am in the process of preparing a PhD dissertation submission at the Faculty of Humanities at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. Rather than preparing a monograph, I have chosen the option of submitting a flerhed af afhandlinger, which translates roughly to “portfolio of research.”

Over the past seven years I have authored a number of published journal articles and anthology chapters within the field of Native American Studies. My PhD project consists of these publications, together with an attempt to establish an underlying theoretical basis for establishing meaningful unifying links between them.

The first aim of my current research activities is to examine the function of identity discourse in establishing/de-establishing and legitimizing/de-legitimizing the sovereignty of a people or nation. A prime underlying hypothesis is that such a discourse of identity is inherently a contested space, and that this space extends beyond the realm of politics to include artifacts of popular culture such as literature.

The second aim is to apply this analysis of identity discourse to the specific cases explored in my existing body of published work. These texts consider the issue of identity both historically, examining early English colonial relations, as well as the contemporary circumstances of Native peoples such as the Cree of Northern Quebec and the Navajo. They also explore the role of literary authors and film directors, including Edmund Spencer, John Ford and Leslie Marmon Silko.

Biography

David Harding has been employed at the Department of English at Aarhus University since 1998, most recently as Foreign Lecturer, with core teaching responsibilities in American and British History and Society, Globalization, and Media Studies. His prime areas of research are within the fields of American Studies, with particular interest in Native American Studies. He has recently expanded his research to include Environmental Studies and Ecotourism. He has also been employed externally over the past 8 years to teach courses within American and British Studies, Globalization, Intercultural Communication, and General English at a number of other Danish institutions of higher learning.

Sharon Holm
Birkbeck College, University of London

Project Summary

My current research explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Native American literary expression, in particular examining various representations and constructions of sovereignty and self-determination from early pictographs and writings to the present. My current monograph aims to develop in greater depth and detail a genealogy of the concept of Native sovereignty in the literature by charting the historical and critical development of a Native-inflected political aesthetic. This political aesthetic is explored through conceptual and theoretical approaches to discursive performance in Native American literary studies as well as through wider contemporary debates of postcolonial and Indigenous political and critical theory.

A chapter of my monograph, which is in early stages of development, discusses representations of the legal system in the works of various Native writers in relation to aspect of a political aesthetic and issues of sovereignty. In particular, the chapter focuses on the representation of legal forums, procedures and discourse in Gerald Vizenor’s work to challenge what have been characterized as depoliticizing aspects of his particular kind of postmodern “trickster discourse” by certain advocates of an American Indian literary nationalism. I explore the relationship of the ‘non-fictional’ (Thomas White Hawk, the “narrative rights of bones”, and his recent promotion of “Genocide Tribunals”) to the ‘fictional’ depictions of trials and hearings, such as “Bone Courts” (The Heirs of Columbus) in his work, to explore ideas of narrative performance and concepts of presence and absence in the legal space in relation to the historical, legal, and political domination of the Law in relation to Native sovereignty. For the workshop, I am looking specifically to further investigate the idea of the body in absentia and its discursive ‘re-presentation’ in the legal arena in Professor Vizenor’s work, but I would also like to discuss related aspects of the use of the legal forum and discourse in other Native texts. This would entail, perhaps, a wider ranging discussion of the relationship of law and literature and its recent interdisciplinary development, but also the specific involvement and intervention of Native narratives with this relationship.

Biography

I am currently a lecturer in the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London where I teach Post-war to Contemporary Literature on the M.A. “Modern and Contemporary Literature”, and the M.A. option “Contemporary U.S. Fiction”, as well as designing and teaching the B.A. option “African American Literature”, and the M.A. option “Indigenous Literatures in English”. I was granted my doctorate by the University of London in April 2007 (Examiners: Professor David Murray and Professor Helen Carr) and have just recently published an article, “The ‘Lie’ of the Land: Native Sovereignty, Indian Literary Nationalism and Early Indigenism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony” in American Indian Quarterly, (32:3, Summer 2008). I am the organizer of a conference “Narratives of Indigeneity: Literature, Law, Sovereignty” to be held in May, 2009.

Joanna Ziarkowska
University of Warsaw, Poland

Project Summary

My project concerns the theme of historical reconstruction as a gesture of challenging the totalizing discourse of national history, and, on a more individual level, a method of asserting agency in contemporary American ethnic literature. The problem of historical representation addresses the fact that what is generally known as official history is written from the point of view of the dominant culture and often excludes events which mar the image of America’s glorious past. Twentieth-century developments in critical theories changed the way historical discourse is viewed: no longer as authoritative and totalizing, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term, but rather as an interpretation, one of many possible, of the past in a narrative form. Thus, literature becomes a site of historical reconstruction which allows to rectify the harms caused by historical misrepresentations and give voice to the marginalized.

In my dissertation, I concentrated on the works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston, and attempted to demonstrate how the reconstruction of the past from an ethnic perspective is engaged on several levels of representation: language, photography, cartography, memory and literary genres. Both Silko and Kingston use these various discourses in an imaginative and often subversive way in order to offer a version of the past that accounts for their groups’ position in contemporary American society and is an essential component in the process of self-identification.

In my project I would like to concentrate on how the theme of the past is addressed and explored by Native American writers. As Lisa Brooks observes in her Afterword to American Indian Literary Nationalism, one of the aims in Native American studies is how to comprehend the “weight” to history and how to put this understanding into words unmarred by the discourse of domination. One of the challenges that the theme of historical representation poses to the study of Native America literature is the creation of a culture-sensitive discourse which allows to convey important ideas without the automatic reliance on theories which emerge as relevant and explanatory in the study of Anglo-American literature.

Biography

Joanna Ziarkowska is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies, Warsaw University. She teaches courses on Native American, Asian American literatures and literary criticism. Her academic interests include American ethnic literature, literary criticism, photography and historical revisionism. She published articles on the works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston.