Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature by Arnold Krupat

Abstract

translating these oral narratives into written English. In showing us what we gain, he also shows us what we lose—or can never have in the first place. /TIM POLAND Radford University¡/¡Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. By Arnold Krupat. (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1992. 288 pages, $35.00/$13.00.) Arnold Krupat has written yet another excellent set of solidly argued essays. As usual his tone is measured and conciliatory; he nods with grace and logic to those who might dispute his claims. “Ethnocriticism” is Krupat’s term for a “particular perspective [which] is manifested on the level of critical writing. On the pedagogical or curricular level, the ethnocritical perspective manifests itself in the form of multiculturalism, a term [he] takes to refer to that particular organization of cultural studies which engages otherness and difference in such a way as to provoke an interrogation of and a challenge to what we ordinarily take as familiar and our own.” Most of Krupat’s long introduction defines, explains, and defends ethnocriticism as concept and practice. In a sophisticated and well-argued discussion, Krupat anticipates and an­ swers the charge that ethnocriticism is no more than “yet another form of discursive and epistemological imperialism” by showing that “ethnocriticism’s self-positioning at a great many frontiers consciously and intentionally courts the questioning of any premises from which it initially proceeds.” In several main chapters he examines the history of the convergence of ethnography and literature, modernism and irony in the work of Franz Boas, and ethnographic “conjuncturalism” in the work of James Clifford. Then, using the four ironic tropes of antiphrasis or negation, aporia or doubt, oxymoron or paradox, and catachresis or misuse, Krupat reads certain Congressional and Cherokee texts— a project of “critical rhetoric” attempting to speak what those texts “cannot or will not say.” Krupat therefore suggests, for example, that the “official” Chero­ kee Memorial, “from the point of view of emplotment, attempts to replace America’s ‘official’ tragic narrative of Indian decline with either an ironic or a comic counternarrative. . . . The Cherokee refuse to accede to the central condition of tragedy [by] refusing a voluntary resignation to their fate.” Krupat discusses the problematics of any possible application of Western textual literary criticism to Native American oral literatures, warning that such readings “may simply be misinterpreting particular cultural details, taking them in ways that would be quite appropriate to Western literary art but which are not at all appropriate to Native American literary art; . . . egregiously mistaken interpretations are the most usual consequence of [readers] applying ‘the kind of critical attitudes [they] bring to other literatures’ [quoting Kroeber] to the literatures of a very different culture.”Finally, Krupat explores the “synecdochic 168 Western American Literature Reviews 169 self’ in Native American autobiographies. There is also an excellent and ex­ haustive bibliography. X^KJ.TCHEN RONNOW Wayne State College ySending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native. American Autobiography. By Hertha Dawn Wong. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 246 pages, $35.00.) As academics continue to consider the several varieties and forms of ethnic expression in American literature, writers have increasingly come to rely on theoretical (re)examinations of texts. Hertha Dawn Wong’s Sending My Heart Back Across the Years is, according to the author, a “suggestive rather than encyclopedic” consideration of several native traditions of self-narration and their subsequent interaction with Euro-American forms of autobiography. Drawing heavily on Bakhtin’s dialogic theories and the autobiographic work of Arnold Krupat, Wong attempts to relate Native American autobiographical forms from pre-contact oral and pictographic personal narratives to contempo­ rary autobiographies. Wong has an interest in expanding our current definition of autobiography (self-life-writing) into new frames of reference more appropri­ ate to Native American cultural experience. Consequently, she suggests the terms communo-bio-oratory (community-life-writing) and auto-ethnography (self-culture-writing) as improvements to our current lexicon. Wong’s re-casting of autobiography adds needed critical sophistication to our readings of Native American texts since, in coining a terminology sensitive to unique genres, she manages to account for the subtleties of transitional oral and literate forms which reflect traditions and...