DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

American Indian Literature and the Southwest

Contexts and Dispositions

Eric Gary Anderson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Texas Press

Published:1st Feb '99

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

American Indian Literature and the Southwest cover

"I know of no other book that ranges as widely over the field of the 'Southwest,' understood as an aesthetic construct... At its best (which is almost always), Anderson's writing is lively, witty, engaging, provocative, readable." -- Robert M. Nelson, Professor of English, University of Richmond

This groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of “alien” and “native” shift with each act of travel.

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest—among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel.

Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.

"I know of no other book that ranges as widely over the field of the 'Southwest,' understood as an aesthetic construct... At its best (which is almost always), Anderson's writing is lively, witty, engaging, provocative, readable." - Robert M. Nelson, Professor of English, University of Richmond

ISBN: 9780292704886

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 454g

239 pages