Intertextual homelands, reimagined communities in two Southwestern novels by Louis Owens

Abstract

In the Native American context, individual and communal identities are often articulated through a privileged connection with the land, a connection that colonization has made complex and problematic. Accordingly, an aesthetic of displacement and dislocation, as well as a counter-impulse of symbolic recuperation, are at work in Nightland (1996) and Dark River (1999), two novels by Louis Owens set in the Southwest. This may lead us to probe the notion of a literary territory, in two acceptations of the term : the depiction of a specific geography, and the ground covered by certain narrative genres and topoi. Owens confronts, trickster-wise, the “invention” of Indians in dominant discourses, by revisiting the two “master narratives” of the Western and the “ethnographic” thriller. Drawing on African-American critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s concept of “Signifyin(g),” we might also wonder whether the constitution of a Native American literary tradition may not morph primarily oral communities into a “people of the book” - whose homelands and sense of belonging are also (inter)textual - and whether the dialogical creation of virtual communities and territories in the realm of fiction may not engage more than literature.