|
|
|
Book Review
| Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. By CHADWICK ALLEN. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. 308 pp. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).
|
|
Blood Narrative is a comparative literary study of indigenous identity in post–World War II literary and activist texts by New Zealand Maori and American Indians—groups who share much in their response to European settler colonialism. The author, Chadwick Allen, has extensive experience working with both groups. In 1994 he held a Fulbright student fellowship at the University of Auckland, where he studied Maori language and culture while interacting with leading scholars of the "Maori renaissance" era. Allen is currently assistant professor of English at Ohio State University and associate editor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literature. |
1
|
|
The book's primary title is a variation on Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday's signature trope "memory in the blood" or "blood memory," which blurs the distinction between racial identity (blood) and narrative (memory). Echoing Momaday, the first American Indian to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literature, Allen examines the discursive practices employed by Maori and American Indians when they attempt to construct contemporary indigenous minority identities as literary and activist texts. He chose Maori and American Indians for comparison because both underwent a long colonial experience and both have writers and activists who mark their identities as distinctive from European-descended settlers. Following initial European contact, both peoples experienced devastating warfare, loss of their lands, and dramatic population declines from which they did not recover until the second half of the twentieth century. Those individuals born after the war came of age during the 1960s and 1970s and produced a "renaissance" that permanently altered the position of indigenous peoples both in North America and the Antipodes. The study's focus is limited to the early contemporary period (World War II through the 1970s), which the author describes as "an era of dramatic social transformations and unprecedented textual production" (p. 2). |
. . . |
There are about 640 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.
|
