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Allen, Chadwick. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. $75.00 hc. $25.00 sc. 336 pp.
In Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Chadwick Allen develops methodologies for global Indigenous literar y studies by challenging us to think beyond the national borders of contemporary (settler) nation-states and to focus on Indigenous-to-Indigenous relationships instead. He reorients understandings of transnationality and indigeneity through juxtaposition of diverse Indigenous texts and, in so doing, provides significant impulses, especially in the fields of Native American and comparative Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and global cultural studies, which affect the practice and transformation of intellectual work in global/transnational American studies as well as Indigenous studies. In an earlier article, titled "A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies That Are Trans-Indigenous?," which he rewrote as the introduction to Trans-Indigenous, Allen reminds us that conventional theories of the transnational operate on a "vertical binar y" (2012a, 3) that subordinates Indigenous peoples. As we work toward a new model that Allen calls "trans-Indigenous," we need "to see [Indigenous texts] on their own complex and evolving terms" (3). In this full-length monograph, Allen prioritizes "the global Indigenous" (2012b, x vii) by juxtaposing Indigenous texts from Native North America, Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai'i, and Australia. The point is to engage these texts into close conversations and to "acknowledge the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts" (xiv): Allen investigates Indigenous roots in terms of global routes.
Trans-Indigenous configures different channels of crossing. It crosses over different fields of inquiries and offers impressive multiperspectivism, which it terms "scholarship across" (xix). It transcends the grids of genre, form, and media and highlights distinct Indigenous aesthetics that mix poetry, photography, sculpture, carving, textile, and live performance, etc.-"making across" (xxii). The language employed transgresses English-centered ideology, for English and Indigenous languages are engaged on equal terms-"reading across" (xxvi). The authors investigated display complex and diverse identities and connections that are not only tribal, intertribal, and transnational,...