Unsettling Fictions: Relationality as Decolonial Method in Native American and South African Literatures

Abstract

This article sets out a rationale for the comparative study of Native American and South African literatures. Though there are numerous points of overlap between Native American and South African experiences of colonial subjugation and anticolonial modes of resistance, scholars seldom consider the literatures produced in these contexts in the same frame. This article demonstrates the productive potential of more expansive frames of study, as well as the necessity of interrogating how categorizations of postcoloniality and indigeneity operate in distinct global spaces. Specifically, it thinks through the grounds on which Native American and South African texts can be read together by focusing on literary engagements with Native American and African onto-epistemologies. I emphasize relationality as a point of connection in my close readings of two novels: Almanac of the Dead (1991) by Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) by the late South African author