Conjuring the Colonizer: Alternative Readings of Magic Realism in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues

Abstract

Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues has inspired both admiration and castigation.1 Critics such as Stephen Evans, Adrian C. Louis, Joseph Coulombe, and James Cox have praised Alexie’s satiric upending of stereotypes about Native Americans, claiming that Alexie’s work “uses stereotypes . . . of the . . . Indian, in new and entirely moral and ethical ways.”2 Other critics such as Gloria Bird, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Kenneth Lincoln, and Louis Owens have argued instead that Alexie’s work “simply reinforces all of the stereotypes desired by white readers [of] . . . absurd and aimless Indians.”3 Yet in his review of the positive and negative scholarship on Alexie, Evans insists that Alexie is “a consciously moral satirist” and not a “cultural traitor.” I would like to contribute to this debate by suggesting a further reason to see Alexie’s work as subversive rather than complicit. In contrast to quite a bit of “multicultural lit,” Alexie’s Reservation Blues does not associate magic with Indian culture so much as with white culture. Much of Reservation Blues turns expected magical tropes on their heads with American Indians presented as the antithesis of magic and the embodiment of rationality. Whether intentionally or not, Alexie confronts stereotypes with their opposites. The text thus inheres magic in the Western rather than in the indigenous, articulating the material struggle at the heart of the colonial relationship.