Inventing interventions : strategies of reappropriation in Native American and First Nations literatures
My doctoral thesis, entitled Inventing Interventions: Strategies of Reappropriation in Native and First Nations Literatures, explores the reappropriation of the English and French languages, as a strategy for retelling and reclaiming hi/stories of the Aboriginal people of Canada and the United States. In effect, my project disregards national and linguistic borders since these are, in essence, cultural and colonial constructs. To reappropriate the colonial language, then, entails not only its mastery as a means for basic communication, but claims it as a means to an end: instead of being owned by and subject to the language, it is now these authors who own the language. The resulting tensions of this process are the product of the imposed and tentative violent transition from one cultural realm to another, which, for many, never succeeded to its fullest, but rather crumbled back upon itself: for First Nations and Native American authors, I argue, creating means through art and politics to “write back” against oppression and injustice. My thesis, an examination of contemporary fictional, autobiographical, historical and political, prosaic and poetic works written in French and English, is structured along the analysis of specific keywords – language, resistance, memory and place. I explore how these concepts are voiced, and how they are not only inter-related but affect each other within the particular discursive framework of Indigenous writing, set in motion by different strategies of intervention (redefinition, invention) and the mixing of different literary devices.
Études autochtones Mémoire collective Indigenous Peoples of North America Native/Aboriginal Studies Literary Studies Literary Criticism Colonization Resistance Reappropriation Governmental policies Sovereignty Collective memory