Insurgencies fromThere There

Abstract

AbstractConsidering Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There (2018) along with John Rollin Ridge’s sensational novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit (1854), this essay examines alternate formations and implications of nineteenth- through twenty-first-century Indigenous resistance to what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense.” The essay uses Orange’s central thematic of “there there” as a formal and conceptual means to rethink the unique historical schemas and stakes of Indigenous fiction then and now. More specifically, the essay examines how these two novels, written by Indigenous authors with starkly different historical and ideological positions, offer nuanced and original portrayals of the complex alternate ground—physical-tactical, cultural, and political—that Indigenous resistance has and must negotiate. Ultimately, it argues that Orange’s novel deploys unique formal strategies that allow a consolidation of historical agency to confront the realities of US imperialism that have rendered Indigenous life and its modes of resistance precarious.