A Question of Relationship: Internationalism and Assimilation in Recent American Indian Studies

Abstract

In the preface to his first book on American Indian literature, The Invention of American Literature, Robert Dale Parker declares provocatively, Native American literature has arrived-or has it? (vii). The recent publication of the five books discussed here might answer Parker's question regarding the field of literary studies. All argue, to some extent, that Indian literature bears on the formation of US culture, and for this reason must not be ignored in mainstream scholarship. I would like to accept Parker's word of caution-not about whether the body of work by and about Indians is growing, for it resoundingly is-but that most scholars, despite an admirable, expanding interest in studying American Indian literature and culture, still approach literary texts primarily as a project to form an interpretive relationship to the literature of an extremely different culture. Whether one views this concern with relationship as a necessary scholarly pursuit or as a distraction from more pressing issues facing Indian people and their literature likely frames the answer to the above question. In the first chapter of Red Matters: American Studies, Arnold Krupat organizes the divergent models of this relationship for scholars in the field. Throughout Red Matters, Krupat further develops his crosscultural approach to minority cultures and literatures, which he has called Ethnocriticism (1992) in an earlier book, but which in this study he names cosmopolitan comparativism. The change in terms matters, for here Krupat expands his discussion of the US relationship to American Indian literature from an engagement between cultures to include an interaction between nations. While in former writing Krupat has been critical of Indian claims to nationhood-and, by extension, national literatures, intellectual independence, and intellectual property-in Red Matters, he concedes the