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Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for global Native literary studies By Chadwick Allen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
One of the more gratifying aspects of studying Indigenous issues at the moment, especially given that the scholarship seems poised to offer a sustained transformation of the conversations pursued at the interstices of postcolonial studies, global studies and critical ethnic studies, is the acumen with which scholars within the field are offering new avenues and innovative ethics for engaging in what are, by necessity, often comparative projects across diverse historical and colonial contexts. As local and global iterations of Indigenous studies articulate the stakes for decolonial analyses of Indigenous governance, resistance and sovereignty, the related fields of literary and cultural studies have followed suit by taking up questions of intellectual, aesthetic and literary sovereignty within and beyond the injunctions of nationalism, cultural patrimony, and rights and responsibilities. In articulating the vitality of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies as philosophically and theoretically sophisticated reading practices, Indigenous studies scholars have called for Indigenous peoples to understand themselves within a global network of other Indigenous societies. Rather than wait in the dustbins of history for that moment in which our own communities might arrive at the table as fully recognized nations within the West, such scholars suggest we might gain more by shifting our attention from such neoliberal traps of recognition and statehood and turn instead to the production of our own modes of intelligibility within and through Indigeneity as a resistant and sustainable alternative to the culture and politics of imperial global capitalism underwriting international state norms.
Toward that end, Chadwick Allen's most recent book from the Indigenous Americas series with the University of Minnesota Press seeks to intervene in some of the extant pitfalls that have...