Ethnopolitical representation of indigenous peoples: Comparative perspectives of the Americas

This dissertation investigates how trends in the literary representation of American Indians function in an ethnopolitical context and considers how both native and author can be interpreted as negotiated social entities. The essay begins with a discussion of how the colonial narratives of initial encounters between European and native reveal cultural and political interests. Narratives of Columbus, Las Casas, and Ralegh are particular foci in this section. Next, a section on nineteenth-century Native American representation will examine the ambivalence of the era in its romantic and realistic portrayals of the indigenous. William Gilmore Simms and Clorinda Matto de Turner are two integral voices in this section. An analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination prefaces this study of the era and shows how authorial discourse evolves into the dialectic representation of subaltern people. The following section, which focuses on twentieth-century Native American literature, is introduced with a section on Michel Foucault's treatment of counter-hegemonic discourse and how it relates to texts written by indigenous Americans in the twentieth century. Authors discussed in this section include Leslie Marmon Silko and Jose Maria Arguedas. The study concludes with a discussion of the conflict between subalterns and subalternist critics. Here, the essay argues that a more pragmatic subaltern position should be incorporated into literary criticism in order to support the subaltern cause for egalitarian representation.