| This study derives a theory of reading American and Native American literatures from nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. It compares two periods of postcolonial efforts in American literary history, the "American Renaissance" and the "Native American Renaissance," focusing on representations of colonial self and other in selected works of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass, from the former period, and Gerald Vizenor, Ray A. Young Bear, and Leslie Marmon Silko, from the latter.;Two epistemologies, dialectic and dialogic, emerge from the texts, forming an open-ended binary: one end is dualistic and objectifying, and the other is multiple and participatory. The colonial dialectic builds binaries of civilization-wilderness, master-slave, white-Indian, noble-savage. Readers reflect those epistemologies, mirroring ways that cultures conceive of power and identity as hierarchical and static or as interactive and dynamic. Epistemology thus links readers with ethics, and aesthetics, by dialectic and dialogic ways of thinking.;Whitman's catalogs frequently eclipse American "others," because of his roots in an American dialectic. In Melville's "Benito Cereno" and in Douglass's Narrative, the dialectic of slavery often prohibits American others from assuming dialogic relations to elude the colonial gaze. In Silko and Young Bear, literary links to their Laguna and Mesquakie oral traditions provide mythic possibilities for postcolonial dialogics. And in Vizenor, his trope of a mixedblood Ojibwa trickster becomes a language game in the dialogic revisioning of colonial history.;Colonial and postcolonial conflicts are not so much in the dialectical clash of cultures, but rather in the misalignment of dialectical, oppositional aspects of cultures against dialogical, transactional aspects. The writings of Vizenor, Silko, and Young Bear clarify dialogic ways to negotiate the binaries of American history, a dialectical history which often seemed to overwhelm Whitman, Melville, and Douglass. Readers of these Native American writers are shown by the narratives and the poems how they necessarily participate in the ethics of reading and reinscribing dialectical or dialogical possibilities. |
