This collectively authored volume celebrates a group of Native critics performing community in a lively, rigorous, sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges the aesthetics of individual literary representation.
Janice Acoose
infuses a Cree reading of Canadian Cree literature with a creative turn to Cree language;
Lisa Brooks
looks at eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Native writers and discovers little-known networks among them;
Tol Foster
argues for a regional approach to Native studies that can include unlikely subjects such as Will Rogers;
LeAnne Howe
creates a fictional character, Embarrassed Grief, whose problematic authenticity opens up literary debates;
Daniel Heath Justice
takes on two prominent critics who see mixed-blood identities differently than he does in relation to kinship;
Phillip Carroll Morgan
uncovers written Choctaw literary criticism from the 1830s on the subject of oral performance;
Kimberly Roppolo
advocates an intertribal rhetoric that can form a linguistic foundation for criticism.
Cheryl Suzack
situates feminist theories within Native culture with an eye to applying them to subjugated groups across Indian Country;
Christopher B. Teuton
organizes Native literary criticism into three modes based on community awareness;
Sean Teuton
opens up new sites for literary performance inside prisons with Native inmates;
Robert Warrior
wants literary analysis to consider the challenges of eroticism;
Craig S. Womack
introduces the book by historicizing book-length Native-authored criticism published between 1986 and 1997, and he concludes the volume with an essay on theorizing experience.
Reasoning Together
proposes nothing less than a paradigm shift in American Indian literary criticism, closing the gap between theory and activism by situating Native literature in real-life experiences and tribal histories. It is an accessible collection that will suit a wide range of courses—and will educate and energize anyone engaged in criticism of Native literature.