Semester:
Offered:
Christopher Pexa (Department of English)
First-Year Seminar 65O 4 credits Enrollment: Limited to 12
What are Native American and Indigenous literatures, and how might we best understand their/our relationship to U.S. and Canadian national literatures? How may we read Native American and Indigenous literatures as asserting both critiques of the United States, Canada, and other settler colonial nations, as well as asserting longstanding forms of Indigenous peoplehood, nationhood, and sovereignty? This seminar attempts to answer such questions by examining Native American and Indigenous writers’ imaginings of resistance, survival, and political and cultural resurgence over roughly 250 years, from the early American colonial period to the present. We will approach all of our readings from the perspectives of Indigeneity, nationhood, kinship, sovereignty, settler colonialism, and decolonization, among others, in a constant endeavor to refine and apply these terms . Note: that while we will take a mostly chronological approach, our inquiry will hardly be exhaustive but instead will concentrate heavily on recent authors and texts.