Literary Geography and the Native American Urban Imaginary in Tommy Orange's There There

Abstract

Ever since Tommy Orange’s novel There There was published in 2018, Native American urban experience has been pointed out as the novel’s crux. The characters in the novel are Native American but most of them feel estranged from the community since they do not live on reservations, whereby the general implication is that reservations have become ossified as identity markers for many Native Americans. This paper aims to analyze how the novel’s characters use urban areas to create spaces of belonging, thus debunking the myth of the “reservation Indian”. Aided by Edward Soja’s theories on Thirdspace and Robert Tally’s theory of topophrenia, the paper discusses regional powwows, non-profit organizations, American Indian cultural centers, and digital storytelling/narrativization as specific examples of the subject’s awareness of space, their engagement and inscription into space through the practices mentioned above.