Mapping the Americas - by Shari M Huhndorf (Paperback)

About the Book

In Mapping the Americas, Shari M. Huhndorf tracks changing conceptions of Native culture as it increasingly transcends national boundaries and takes up vital concerns such as global imperialism, and the commodification of indigenous cultures.

Book Synopsis

In Mapping the Americas, Shari M. Huhndorf tracks changing conceptions of Native culture as it increasingly transcends national boundaries and takes up vital concerns such as patriarchy, labor and environmental exploitation, the emergence of pan-Native urban communities, global imperialism, and the commodification of indigenous cultures.While nationalism remains a dominant anticolonial strategy in indigenous contexts, Huhndorf examines the ways in which transnational indigenous politics have reshaped Native culture (especially novels, films, photography, and performance) in the United States and Canada since the 1980s. Mapping the Americas thus broadens the political paradigms that have dominated recent critical work in Native studies as well as the geographies that provide its focus, particularly through its engagement with the Arctic.Among the manifestations of these new tendencies in Native culture that Huhndorf presents are Igloolik Isuma Productions, the Inuit company that has produced nearly forty films, including Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner; indigenous feminist playwrights; Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead; and the multimedia artist Shelley Niro. Huhndorf also addresses the neglect of Native America by champions of "postnationalist" American studies, which shifts attention away from ongoing colonial relationships between the United States and indigenous communities within its borders to U.S. imperial relations overseas.This is a dangerous oversight, Huhndorf argues, because this neglect risks repeating the disavowal of imperialism that the new American studies takes to task. Parallel transnational tendencies in American studies and Native American studies have thus worked at cross-purposes: as pan-tribal alliances draw attention to U.S. internal colonialism and its connections to global imperialism, American studies deflects attention from these ongoing processes of conquest. Mapping the Americas addresses this neglect by considering what happens to American studies when you put Native studies at the center.

Review Quotes

Long before Columbus arrived, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were transnational--their migrations, trade routes, and story sharing attest to this. After Columbus, additional layers of colonial and postcolonial transnationalism complicated this process in horrifically tragic ways but also in positive expressions of hybridization and sovereignty. In clear and convincing prose, Mapping the Americas places the complex dynamics of tribal transnationalism at the forefront of Native American and American studies. Shari M. Huhndorf addresses this multilayered process from appropriately multiple angles by examining the colonization of Alaska, Inuit media, transnational feminism--including a provocative reading of Spiderwoman Theater's Sun Moon and Feather--and the transnational, transtime visual narratives of Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Huhndorf concludes with a brilliant reading of the portraits, maps, and sculpture of Shelley Niro's installation The Border--a reading that incorporates Mohawk images and the importance of women while highlighting the turn to the transnational in post-1980 indigenous politics, art, and literature.

About the Author

Shari M. Huhndorf is Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, also from Cornell.