(DOWNLOAD) "Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 84 KB
Description
In this article I address issues of place, mobility, and politics that have emerged in transnational American studies and I analyze parallels between works by Margo Tamez, a Lipan Apache writer of the Mexico-U.S. border and those of Taiwanese Tao writer Syman Rapongan. Using emerging Native American scholarship in Taiwan as my point of departure, I ask how Native American texts can be adapted, translated, articulated, and interpreted in a transnational, trans-Pacific context. The recent emergence of a network of Taiwanese scholars and Aboriginal activists involved in Lipan Apache land claims is partly what prompts this inquiry into the historical predicaments that unite Taiwanese Aborigines and Native Americans. I seek here to inquire what can be learned from studying Native American and Taiwanese Indigenous texts side by side. Through collaboration across institutional lines, exploration of the community production of knowledge, and our obligation and desire to participate meaningfully in Native studies, we conceive of an expansive region across the Pacific in which "indigeneity" is both rooted in and routed through particular places. Contextualizing contemporary Native American literature across national boundaries can de-center both "America" and the United States, in this case vis-a-vis Asia. To think of "indigeneity" as "articulated," as James Clifford suggests, is to "recognize the diversity of cultures and histories that currently make claims under this banner" (472). By envisioning an expanding network of an Indigenous coalition, I attempt to formulate positive notions of transnational indigeneity, which in turn feed back into local native traditions. In an email on 14 November 2007 poet Margo Tamez called upon her friends to publicize the situation in El Calaboz Rancheria, where Lipan Apache communities that held land titles faced worsening conditions: "I wish I was writing under better circumstances, but I must be fast and direct. My mother and elders of El Calaboz, since July have been the targets of numerous threats and harassments by the Border Patrol, Army Corps of Engineers, NSA, and the U.S. related to the proposed building of a fence on their levee. Since July, they have been the targets of numerous telephone calls, unexpected and uninvited visits on their lands, informing them that they will have to relinquish parts of their land grant holdings to the border fence buildup. The NSA demands that elders give up their lands to build the levee, and further, that they travel a distance of 3 miles, to go through checkpoints, to walk, recreate, and to farm and herd goats and cattle, on their own lands." Here, I take up Tamez's desperate and provocative communication of these controversial border issues, examining the formation of indigenous identity/ies within shifting geographical, political, and cultural frameworks. To comprehend the issue Tamez raised in her email, we need to trace the history of Native American land loss across the Mexico-U.S. border. One of the most paradigmatically challenging shifts occurred when European forces began the takeover of Native American lands upon "discovery" in 1492, including the home bases of border Indigenes. The second shift began with the takeover of the American Southwest by the U.S. after its war with Mexico in 1848--an appropriation that transformed Indigenous land into part of the U.S. Southwest, and a Mexican into an American, although not necessarily into a U.S. citizen with full legal rights. In addition, Tamez's tribal communities, the Lipan and Jumano Apache, have been split on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border since 1752, when the Spanish forged the camino militar (military road) along the Rio Grande to protect their Northern boundaries against French, British, and US-American invasion. This road later became the International Boundary line between the U.S. and Mexico and today is policed by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol.