|
|
|
Book Review
Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. By Shari M. Huhndorf. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. xvi, 220 pp. Cloth, $42.50, ISBN 0-8014-3832-2. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-8014-8695-5.)
|
Teaching American Indian history, more than other courses, demands attention to the politics of representation. Non-native students are likely to be completely unfamiliar with the historical material presented to them and, at the same time, to feel an ownership and strong attachment to particular images of Indians. As Shari M. Huhndorf argues in Going Native, the racial dynamics of conquest, encoded into popular culture, are still very much central to non-native American identity. For this compelling reason, this book is a useful and imaginative addition to the literature on Indian-white relations. |
1 |
|
Huhndorf attends to specific historical moments from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries in which Euro-Americans "go native," taking on Indian culture and/or identity as a defense against the shortcomings of modern life. She writes, |
2 |
|
| The politics of going native,
then, are extremely complex. Exhibiting profound ambivalence
about America's past as well as about modernity, forms of
going native also support European-American hegemony.
|
. . . |
There are about 393 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|