Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions

Abstract

Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions. Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Thomas King is perhaps most well-known Native writer in Canada today. Not only are his works widely taught in university literature and Native studies courses-particularly his novels Medicine River (1990) and Green Grass, Running Water (1993)-but he has also achieved immense public acclaim for his parodie, and at times irreverent, CBC Radio program The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour (1995-2000). In 1999, scholarly journal Canadian Literature devoted an entire issue to King's writing (Kroller 1999); however, issue was dedicated primarily to his innovative novel Green Grass, Running Water. Border Crossings is first full-length study of King's enormously influential body of creative fiction and multimedia work, and it is certainly long overdue. Its breadth of focus makes this text particularly valuable to scholars and teachers interested in King's work. It is little-known fact, for example, that King is also an accomplished photographer who has staged exhibitions throughout United States and Canada. Nor are many of his readers aware of fact that he wrote his PhD thesis in 1986 at University of Utah on images of Aboriginals in English literature, few years before Terry Goldie's more well-known and oft-cited study Fear and Temptation. King's acting and screen-writing work, as well as his children's stories, are also rarely discussed. These are all topics that enter into this exhaustive, interdisciplinary study of King's oeuvre. Ranging from his creative fiction, to his critical essays and anthologies, to his film-scripts, to his photographic work, this study provides an invaluable overview of King's spirit and creative output. It will undoubtedly become key reference point for any future scholarship on King. Despite King's own critique of postcolonial criticism in his article Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial, Border Crossings takes postcolonial approach to King's engagement with legacies of imperialism for North American Native peoples. And rightly so. The fact remains, notwithstanding King's rejection of postcolonialism's focus on period beginning with the advent of Europeans in North (King 1997, 242-43), that King's creative work tends to focus on implications of colonial contact and its problematic legacy for Native peoples. John Willinsky's Learning to Divide World explores how legacy of imperialism has had pervasive influence on ways we experience our world-namely, ways we are educated to structure reality according to rigid, and generally falsifying, borders and boundaries. The future legacy of many contemporary Aboriginal writers in North America may prove to be undoing of these boundaries and debilitating divisions they instill. This is focus of Border Crossings. As authors of this study put it, King's work ensures a multiplicity of perspectives that create dialogue across borders rather than merely reasserting solidity of borders that typically divide Native and non-Native communities (7). The focus of this study is two-fold. First, it explores various stylistic and thematic border crossings and boundary subversions as these occur in King's life and work. Second, it is concerned with King's comic inversions-that is, ways in which his texts sustain counterdiscursive perspective by mingling with political. This contributes to what authors identify as trickster effect of King's work. On one hand, his work inverts inherited values, particularly those measures of 'difference' that have oppressed Native peoples (54). On other hand, his fictions are sly, performing as tricksters which lure [readers] into believing one thing at their own expense (55). …