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Chadwick Allen. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. isbn: 978-0-8166-7818-1. 336 pp.
As the title suggests, Chadwick Allens Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies sets about to illuminate the potentialities of juxtaposition as a trans-Indigenous literary studies methodology, not only in terms of place but also in relation to temporality and medium. Via several case studies, Allen lays out a number of methodological templates centered on contextual and temporal juxtaposition that at the very least provide literary scholars (and Indigenous studies scholars more generally) with pointed examples and discussions on the possibilities for the production of new insights at the interstitial spaces created by the juxtaposition of Indigenous cultures, temporality, and media, whose combination falls beyond how scholars of indigeneity would typically order investigation centered on "local" knowledge.
Part I, entitled "Recovery/Interpretation," comprises two chapters that in large part deal with subjugated knowledge, that is, texts "excluded from the scholarly conversation thus far" and that, further, may lead to a redirection of interpretation. Chapter 1, "'Being Indigenous 'Now,'" establishes the methodology of looking across various Indigenous contexts at a historical moment in time. Allen uses the 1965 special issue of the Midcontinent American Studies Journal, titled "The Indian Today," as the central piece in dialectical conversation with other similar "surveys" of Indigenous cultures such as "Canadian Indians Today'"(i963), On Being Hawaiian (1964), Aborigines Now: New Perspective in the Study of Aboriginal Communities (1964), and The Maori Today (1964), most of which are edited volumes that attempt to explain both the "traditional" and contemporary integratory conditions of indigeneity via accepted taxonomical categorizations signified by the temporal marker of "today." Here the dialectic between the central text and the others provokes questions that archetypal monocontextual analysis does not allow for. Yet, I am not convinced of the new insights enabled by this methodology. Do I need comparisons with other settler surveys to realize that "The Indian Today," compiled by "hip" white academics in the 1960s, fails to consider their complicity with the ongoing structures of colonialism? How does the dialectic between "The Indian Today" and reflections on Hawaiian and Maori temporal (i.e., 1960s) ontologies, for example, help me better comprehend such subjugation? The racist discourses that emanate from the...