Between Two Emancipations: Louise Erdrich and the Politics of Disavowal

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F26%3A4P7XF3AS" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/26:4P7XF3AS - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-105012429399&doi=10.1093%2Fmelus%2Fmlaf010&partnerID=40&md5=9a3a594b9c86243b427e7242394046f5" target="_blank" >https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-105012429399&doi=10.1093%2Fmelus%2Fmlaf010&partnerID=40&md5=9a3a594b9c86243b427e7242394046f5</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlaf010" target="_blank" >10.1093/melus/mlaf010</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Between Two Emancipations: Louise Erdrich and the Politics of Disavowal

Original language description

Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman (2020) recounts a fictionalized history of the Turtle Mountain Reservation's fight against the US government's attempt in the early 1950s to ""emancipate"" the tribe by terminating its tribal status. I begin my discussion, however, with the debate about the politics of Erdrich's aesthetics inaugurated by Leslie Marmon Silko's critique of The Beet Queen (1986). Because of its explicitly political context, The Night Watchman offers an ideal occasion to revisit these questions about the relation between politics and aesthetics in Erdrich's fiction. Drawing on American studies and Indigenous studies, I show that the novel foregrounds disavowal as the dominant structure by which the US settler state works simultaneously to acknowledge and deny Indigenous rights and sovereignty, a structure exemplified by the policies of the termination era (1940s-60s). Erdrich's novel challenges anti-Indigenous violence by staging different possibilities of emancipation. While the central narrative privileges a politics of recognition, in which the settler state continues to recognize the sovereign status of the Turtle Mountain Reservation, the novel represents other forms of political engagement. One occurs through a brief allusion to Lolita Lebron and Puerto Rican nationalism and their strategy of revolutionary counterviolence. The novel becomes further complicated, however, in its persistent yet elliptical allusions to Blackness and Black history. I conclude the article with a series of open provocations that question the limits of Erdrich's political aesthetic in terms of its capacity to imagine forms of solidarity across racial and ethnic differences. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_SC - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

MELUS

ISSN

19463170

e-ISSN

0163755X

Volume of the periodical

50

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

24

Pages from-to

141 - 164

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-105012429399