Content area
Abstract
The following thesis is comprised of three major components. The first is an analysis of literature based in the American West at the turn of the 20th century which establishes a definition and framework for loric power, or the emplaced power of stories. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of cultural borderlands, it analyzes the way that loric power interacts with colonization in three distinct ways: 1) erasure, 2) emplacement, and 3) reclamation. As settlers moved west enacting the violence of colonization, Indigenous populations were forced off of their land. This piece investigates the role that stories played in that process, and how those stories continue to effect the cultural landscape today.
The second piece picks up that thread. It is a personal narrative analyzing the myths emplaced in the western landscape in which I was raised, and the cultural ramifications of those myths. Ongoing stories that emplace Native Americans in the past separate them from the present, allowing white society to ignore the ongoing oppression and colonization that they continue to face. In a blend of the literary analysis in the first piece and the cultural critique of the second, the third and final piece is an Instagram page. Geared towards the “bookstagram” community, the goal of the page is to engage people already interested in literature in conversations about the erasure of Indigenous people within canonical western novels and within the very concept of the canon. Together, these three pieces open the conversation to analyze the role of emplaced stories.
