Leanne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature - (Southern Literary Studies) by Kirstin L Squint (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

With the publication of her first novel, Shell Shaker (2001), Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture the complexities of Native American life and interrogate histories of both cultural and linguistic oppression throughout the United States.

In the first monograph to consider Howe's entire body of work, LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature, Kirstin L. Squint expands contemporary scholarship on Howe by examining her nuanced portrayal of Choctaw history and culture as modes of expression. Squint shows that Howe's writings engage with Native, southern, and global networks by probing regional identity, gender power, authenticity, and performance from a distinctly Choctaw perspective--a method of discourse which Howe terms "Choctalking." Drawing on interdisciplinary methodologies and theories, Squint complicates prevailing models of the Native South by proposing the concept of the "Interstate South," a space in which Native Americans travel physically and metaphorically between tribal national and U.S. boundaries. Squint considers Howe's engagement with these interconnected spaces and cultures, as well as how indigeneity can circulate throughout them.

This important critical work--which includes an appendix with a previously unpublished interview with Howe--contributes to ongoing conversations about the Native South, positioning Howe as a pivotal creative force operating at under-examined points of contact between Native American and southern literature.

Review Quotes

Kirstin L. Squint is a pioneer. With this monograph, she has produced the first book-length study of the work of Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe and only the second literary study of the Native South. Howe is one of Native America's best and most protean authors. This is an important study and one that is overdue.--Jace Weaver, coauthor of American Indian Literary Nationalism

Kirstin L. Squint vastly expands our understanding of the unique and varied works of the amazing Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe, situating her as a gifted theorist, a wry and wise essayist, and above all, as a key creator of Native, southern, and transnational narrative. Critically sophisticated and cogently argued, Squint's study will be the book on Howe and her world for years to come.--John Wharton Lowe, author of Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature

This is such an important book. Kirstin L. Squint deftly and powerfully centers her study on the work of major Choctaw writer, performer, and intellectual LeAnne Howe and, in so doing, offers incredibly refreshing ways of reading Native and southern texts, histories, and cultures alongside and in the midst of each other. Mapping complex Indigenous Interstate Souths, Squint reveals deep connections between Native and southern studies and changes the world for both.--Eric Gary Anderson, coeditor of Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture

About the Author

Kirstin L. Squint is associate professor of English at High Point University. Her articles have appeared in MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Studies in American Humor, and elsewhere.