Indigenous Writers Research Articles

Language, Water, Dance: An Indigenous Meditation on Time

This essay, “Language, Water, and Dance,” offers a meditation on pandemic time by engaging with Native American histories in relation to Indigenous epistemologies and theories as well as recent events. Looking to Winter Counts and science fiction by Indigenous authors, this meditation suggests that how we think of time and reality are intimately linked to settler colonialism in the United States. The creative form of the essay mirrors the ways in which Indigenous writers and theorists describe time as a spiral rather than a linear progression of lived experience. Relationality and Dakotaness are at the center of the essay’s stories of activism, performance, and survival. A discussion of the “Native slipstream” connects science fiction to the work of water protectors and the NoDAPL movement. The recordings of events through Winter Counts demonstrate how memory and history are collectively shared processes that were also linked to colonial pressures to assimilate Indigenous peoples living in the Plains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, further suggesting that the first pandemic to impact Indian Country was a colonial one. Concluding with a brief reading from Cherie Dimaline’s young-adult novel, The Marrow Thieves, suggests that as long as we can dream there is still hope for the world where being a good relative is at the center.

Land and the Language of Race: State Colonization and the Privatization of Indigenous Lands in Araucanía, Chile (1871–1916)

AbstractThis article explores the vision, process, and reaction to the privatization of Mapuche lands in Araucanía, Chile, from 1871 to 1916. It shows how politicians developed a racial vision for Araucanía between 1871 and 1882 during the final battle with independent Mapuche forces. Chilean government officials and elite societies created land policies that targeted the removal of indigenous populations from fertile lands to expand industrial agriculture by favoring large Chilean-owned estates and partitioning small to medium-sized plots to European settler-farmers. From 1883 to 1896, the Chilean government put its vision into practice, investing in the recruitment of European farmers and reconsidering new laws regarding colonization, land rights, and indigenous settlements. However, after the 1891 civil war, the government retreated from expensive state-building projects. From 1896 to 1916, Chilean small farmers intensified land grabs and, in response, indigenous communities formed organizations to defend their lands. At the core of the conflict were the issues of land and racialized policies that defined land access. By examining laws, government reports, missionary chronicles, and indigenous writings, this article demonstrates the progression of a racialized language that excluded indigenous peoples from their lands, founded in the desire to privatize native lands and accelerate the making of a modern Europeanized nation.

LITERATURA INDÍGENA: ENTRE MEMÓRIAS

ABSTRACT: This text shows Brazilian indigenous writers and their journey to become effective as content producers. The research took place through a bibliographic and audiovisual review on indigenous social, political and cultural movements, especially with articles and texts written by these people. This academic path was fundamental in tracing a history of the communities associating the way of guaranteeing rights to the development of indigenous literature. When bringing the voices of indigenous people to confirm the facts, the article demonstrates that such literature can be developed collectively or personally, and regardless of that, it always refers to every people, to every ancestry. This research is also justified as oral memory writings where they describe their experiences between Indians and white man, searching for knowledge and recognition.

(Re)fashioning the Tribal Self-image: Reading Contemporary Tribal Writings from India in Translation

Tribal voices are perennially absent in the domains of disciplinary knowledges. Contemporary indigenous writings from different parts of the world contest this archival and textual invisibility of the indigenous subject by documenting the unremitting pain and anguish these communities undergo due to systematic territorial displacement and cultural dislocations. Literary narratives originating within these indigenous communities transcend paradigms of literature by offering a dynamic repertoire of indigenous epistemic practices and lived experiences. Keeping this understanding broadly in the background and contemporary tribal literature(s) from India at the focal point, this paper proposes to argue that critical readings of such texts problematize predominant discourses of ‘indigeneity’. Embedded within the (neo)colonial ethnic stereotypes is the reductionist understanding of ‘indigeneity’ which puts forward a dualistic image of the tribal subject who is either an innocent, vulnerable relic of the past requiring preservation or a savage primitive needing subdual. Contemporary tribal writings from India offer a critical departure from rigid one-dimensional reading of the tribal character/person. By getting further translated into multiple Indian languages and in English, these narratives carry the potential to respond to contexts of suffering, displacement and persecution far removed from the spatiotemporal boundaries of the local context in which they originate. Hence, the act of translation not only ensures mobility to such texts but creates new space(s) for similar narratives of indigenous resistance to engage with each other and also extend the practice of tribal self-fashioning.

:Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

:<i>Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures</i>

Elicura Chihuailaf: Oralitura, (Self-) Translation and Cultural Mediation Across Trans-Indigenous Networks

ABSTRACT Current literary productions of Indigenous authorship have established their own “significant geographies”: imaginative and real communities of literary production and projection that authors inhabit beyond the imposed universalist categories of “world” and “global.” In this context, the Mapuche writer Elicura Chihuailaf stands as a clear example of a cultural mediator committed to the strengthening of interperipheral networks among Indigenous literatures in Abya Yala. The roles that Chihuailaf performs will be analyzed through three related and confluent cultural products and practices: his development of the concept of oralitura, his (self-) translating practice, and his work as cultural agent. The term oralitura will be analyzed in terms of its regional impact and dissemination in the configuration of trans-Indigenous conversations. Chihuailaf’s role as a self-translator and translator of non-Mapuche texts into Mapudungun will be studied as an intercultural practice and political gesture that puts Mapudungun on a par with Spanish as a literary language. His role as a cultural agent will be examined through his participation in the organizing of two historical literary events: Zugutrawun (1994) and Taller de Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas de América (1997), both being milestones for the regional networking of Indigenous writers.

Indigenous Futurisms and Decolonial Horror: An Interview with Rebecca Roanhorse

This interview with Black and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo author Rebecca Roanhorse explores the innovations she has brought to horror and science-fiction genres by speaking from the colonial difference and centring Indigenous histories, cosmologies, and spirituality in her works. The influence of Grace Dillon’s concept of Indigenous Futurisms on Roanhorse’s oeuvre is explored, as is the importance of Indigenous representation in white-dominated literary fields and how such representation can resist colonial repression while empowering Indigenous people in real life. Finally, Roanhorse speaks to the ways in which corporations such as Lucasfilm and Marvel are increasingly acknowledging a historic lack of diversity – or a historic offensive stereotyping of marginalised groups – and actively working to undo this harm by producing series entirely created by Indigenous writers that expand opportunities and give them the license to create stories from their unique cultural perspective.

Aubrey Jean Hanson, ed. Literatures, Communities, and Learning: Conversations with Indigenous Writers

Aubrey Jean Hanson, ed. <i>Literatures, Communities, and Learning: Conversations with Indigenous Writers</i>

Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire ed. by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla (review)

Reviewed by: Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire ed. by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla Savannah Esquivel (bio) Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire edited by Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla Duke University Press, 2020 INDIGENOUS TEXTUAL CULTURES examines literacy practices and communication technologies in Indigenous societies impacted in particular by British and French intrusion in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Literacy has often been examined from the point of view of imperial agents or anti-colonial leaders. Indigenous Textual Cultures shifts focus by highlighting the potency of orality and auditory practices. It contends Indigenous societies used alphabetic literacy to intervene in emergent transregional communication networks, often sustaining Indigenous knowledge practices through a "symbiotic relationship" between literacy and orality (149). A range of studies examines how Indigenous textual literacy exposed contradictions within colonial matrices of power, undermined the authority of the written or printed word, and compelled colonial agents to rethink material and discursive contours of mass literacy campaigns. The volume delivers a nuanced picture of how Indigenous mobilizations of literacy created new intellectual forums in an increasingly interconnected world. Indigenous Textual Cultures presents a range of approaches for uplifting the writing and reading practices of Indigenous societies from models that place literacy and orality in opposition. On the one hand, contributors deftly engage canonical debates about literacy and orality to establish a framework for delinking settler-colonial perspectives and historiographical antecedents from analyses of writing and reading in Indigenous communities. By showing that Western notions of literacy do not align with the Indigenous knowledge traditions inscribed on paper or recorded on cassette tapes, the authors in this collection underline the necessity for new interpretative approaches that address the push-pull dynamics of literacy and incorporate the perspective of Indigenous writers, readers, and listeners. On the other hand, the volume's meticulous examination of the sonic contours of a range of "texts" in imperial and ancestral languages—from grief chants to pidgin-language newspapers, didactic narratives to radio broadcasts—opens up new avenues for analysis of the performative and imaginative [End Page 195] dimensions of Indigenous literacy practices. Indeed, examining Indigenous writing through the lens of the "durability of orality" (196) reminds us that colonial impositions could serve as potent vehicles for expressing Indigenous priorities. Organized thematically into four parts, Indigenous Textual Cultures intersects with recent work on textual media and communication systems often engaged on a hemispheric level. The volume's twelve chapters and introduction focus on southern Africa, Australia, North America, and the Pacific Islands. Notably, the collection enfolds scholarship on imperial and vernacular literacies in Africa, initiating a conversation that transcends disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries. The first part, "Archives & Debates," engages the underutilized archive of Indigenous-language sources in the Pacific. Studies demonstrate Indigenous societies actively participated in writing and used textual practices and technologies for the intergenerational exchange of knowledge embedded in oral culture. In particular, Lachy Paterson stresses the "interplay of oral and textual forms" (92) when documents were read out loud as a reminder that nonwriters were nevertheless active participants in literacy culture. The second part, "Orality and Texts," examines how Indigenous communities maintained a "primacy of orality" (136) alongside new communicative practices, technologies, and skills. The introduction of writing fostered auditory practices that bolster Indigenous historical memories and oral recitation structures. The third part, "Readers," focuses on the creation of new publics, notably centering societies for whom colonization and the introductions of writing and reading is a living memory. Here, studies of literacy transmission reveal Indigenous peoples engaged with newspapers in vernacular and imperial languages, Christian radio broadcasts, and missives in unexpected ways, compelling missionaries and bureaucrats to reformulate strategies to accommodate the preferences of new Indigenous publics. The fourth and final part, "Writers," considers how Indigenous literacy intervenes in colonial textual regimes that erase and rework Indigenous texts. By examining how Indigenous writers take a "portfolio approach to authorship" (247), the authors posit an expansive notion of literacy to encompass the dynamic social relations embedded in the practices Indigenous writers mobilized when writing for their own communities. The most compelling chapters in Indigenous Textual Cultures...

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life Will Clark (bio) When TOMMY PICO, a queer poet from the Viejas Reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation in Southern California, won the 2018 Whiting Award for poetry, the selection committee praised the "inventiveness" of his "contemporary epics." Framing PICO'S book-length poems through a Western genre, the judges describe PICO'S work as a "forceful … interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self" that is novel for connecting sexual exploration to histories of Indigenous dispossession.1 In celebrating PICO through the veil of a Western genre system, however, the committee obscures the Indigenous genealogies and queer Indigenous poetry that inform PICO'S composition. Yet, the very coloniality of the Whiting Award committee's evaluation unwittingly illustrates a crucial analytic for the way Indigenous writers exist athwart colonial spaces. [End Page 523] That is through what Indigenous critic GERALD VIZENOR calls a "fugitive pose": an Indigenous strategy for hiding in plain sight to combat either outright erasure or the tokenization of Indigenous life in U.S. culture, politics, and history.2 As VIZENOR explains, U.S. narratives have long obscured the "real" experience of Native life behind a "cultural pageantry" that obfuscates the present-day lived experience of Native peoples.3 In this environment, as MARK RIFKIN elaborates, longstanding presumptions of extinction have relegated Native peoples into a "static" past, maintaining the dispossession of Native peoples from land, political power, and cultural visibility.4 In the face of ongoing dispossession, the fugitive pose fosters Native cultural practices that are purposefully "elusive" to the settler imaginary.5 Moreover, as VIZENOR argues, this latent agency is critical for an Indigenous practice of "survivance" that combines survival and resistance to renounce "dominance, tragedy, and victimry."6 PICO'S work deploys such a pose: it enacts a survivance that remains fugitive to the gatekeepers of mainstream poetry who value novelty to the Western tradition more than Indigenous genealogies. The modes of resistance afforded by the fugitive pose for queer Indigenous people, however, remain obscure. Examining his recent book-length poems, Nature Poem (2016) and Junk (2017), I show that Pico presents a sustained argument insisting that fugitivity and Indigenous queerness are deeply interconnected phenomena. In this, Pico answers a call by scholars of queer Indigenous history Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, who suggest that queer Indigenous subjects experience a dual fugitivity that needs further articulation in both queer studies and Indigenous scholarship. On the one hand, although the "diversity [of queer Indigenous knowledge] has been cited as an inspiration for GLBTQ identities," queer critique tends to ignore the "dissent lines that activists, artists, and scholars have already built," leaving Indigenous experience an asterisk.7 At the same time, Driskill and their [End Page 524] coauthors attest to an unmet need for Indigenous scholarship to uncover how the diversity of queer Indigenous sexualities offers distinct, if understudied, knowledge by which to decolonize scholarship and public life alike.8 Because of the ongoing obfuscation of queer indigeneity, contemporary Driftpile Cree Nation poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt calls for a more declarative presence than that offered by a fugitive pose. As Belcourt explains, queer and trans Indigenous peoples face the most "acute and world-shattering" violence and require active demands for knowledge that "queers and indigenizes freedom" itself.9 Not only is attention to queer Indigenous experience necessary for the decolonization of Native life, but what Belcourt describes as the "non-sovereignty of the sexual" offers a method to construct a world for queer Indigenous people that moves beyond cultural and political forms that propagate Western domination.10 This undertheorized conjunction of queer and Indigenous fugitivity is what Pico's poetics embody, creating an evasive space to envision the present and future of queer Indigenous life. But Pico's poetry does more than merely testify to queer Indigenous conditions—it broadcasts that experience into the public sphere through a form attuned to the contradictions of literary history and twenty-first-century media, with a goal of reshaping the horizons of modern poetics through the image of queer indigeneity. As such, Pico's approach to contemporary queer indigenousness...

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente

Reviewed by: Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente Stacie Charbonneau Hess Jesse Wente. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance. Canada: Penguin Random House, 2021. 198 pp. Hardcover, $29.95 CAN / $22.95 US. Jesse Wente believes in a good story. He has built his career around story-telling: first, as a film student, then a radio columnist, a film critic, and now holding one of the most influential positions in Canada—Director of the Indigenous Screen Office—which was established in 2018. If Wente believes in a good story, he believes even more in "narrative sovereignty," defined by him as "the idea that people, communities, and nations should control their own stories and the tools used in that storytelling" (168). In the context of his memoir, Unreconciled, he is referring to the narrative sovereignty of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, those peoples whose presence preceded the invention of Canada by thousands of years. When Indigenous stories are told by another group—say, the powerful film industry moguls in Hollywood, or the white editor of a popular magazine—that's cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is the very topic for which Wente became a household name in Canada in 2017, after he cried on live television. Although there are many emotionally charged passages in Wente's memoir, two scenes might become painfully engraved in the readers' minds. The first is ten-year-old Jesse playing softball on his home turf in Toronto, when a crowd of neighborhood kids taunt him with a war whoop. Wente recognizes the sound—not as one he has ever made, or heard, in real life—but as one from Saturday morning cartoons. That war whoop is Wente's first experience with blatant racism, and shapes his ideas about Hollywood (mis)representation. In another blistering scene, Wente breaks down and sobs in emotional exhaustion on a live morning talk show—some three decades later. His exhaustion reaches its peak after a public battle over a now-legendary 2017 issue of Write magazine that featured all indigenous authors, authors whose names [End Page 260] would be obscured by the ensuing drama over cultural appropriation. Wente's exhaustion is with the white-centeredness of everything in Canada—even an issue that is supposed to celebrate indigenous writers. He is careful to name each of those writers in a chapter called "The Power to Tell Our Own Stories." Throughout the book, Wente's frustration is palpable, and Unreconciled reads as a manifesto to his educated, well-thought-out torment as a person still processing trauma as he presses on in the face of it. Wente is American and Anishinaabe, a member of the Serpent River First Nation. His grandmother Norma, to whom this book is dedicated, was a student in Spanish for ten years at a residential school. Despite living with Jesse for his entire adolescence, she spoke of it only once. Two generations separated from both the Reserve and the Ojibwe language, Wente laments that his upwardly mobile, English-speaking family is "the exact type of Indians residential schools were designed to produce" (17). In this way, Wente's story is a familiar one. He calls the "damage wrought by residential schools" his family's "unwanted inheritance" (75). Wente's parents are executives and he attended private high school. One chapter is even named: "Ojibwe Enough." Yet, the memoir does more than admit to the complication of straddling two identities; Wente's stories interweave personal tribulations in the context of the changing political landscape of Canada. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was issued in 2015, seven years and six thousand interviews after it began. Whether the country has lived up to its intention to recreate a more equitable Canada is, according to Wente, not even a matter for debate. Despite the fact that Canada is years ahead of the United States in terms of reckoning with its genocidal past, Wente insists the wound colonialism has caused is still wide open, and not even healing. Unreconciled can be at times jarring and uncomfortable—but maybe that is the point. A nation can't get to the Reconciliation part without wading in the...

Establishing Time Criticism

Establishing Time Criticism

Book Review: Literatures, Communities, and Learning: Conversations with Indigenous Writers

Book Review: Literatures, Communities, and Learning: Conversations with Indigenous Writers

"You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned": Or, How Yoda, Decolonization, and Indigenous Digital Media Fit Together

"You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned"Or, How Yoda, Decolonization, and Indigenous Digital Media Fit Together Alix Shield (bio) In Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Master Yoda explains to Luke Skywalker that in order to truly master the ways of "The Force," he must make space for other ways of thinking: "You must unlearn what you have learned," says Yoda. Almost forty years later and set after the fall of the Empire, Star Wars fans fell in love with the character of Baby Yoda (or Grogu) with the 2019 release of The Mandalorian. For many Indigenous artists and creators, Yoda and Baby Yoda represent the parallels between "The Force"—the universe's energy field—and Indigenous ways of knowing; in fact, over the past two years Baby Yoda has inspired Indigenous artists around the world, and has been reinterpreted through art, beadwork, and memes.1 If we consider Yoda's words in the context of conversations around decolonization, Star Wars becomes a surprising but effective entry-point into Indigenous digital media. In this essay, I speak to my experiences teaching INDG 222: Introduction to Indigenous Digital Media in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University, located in Burnaby, BC, on the unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh (səl'ilw'ətaʔɬ), Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ'əm), Squamish (Sḵwxwú7mesh), and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy'əm) Nations. In INDG 222,2 we cover topics including Indigenous data sovereignty, Traditional Knowledge labelling,3 digital repatriation,4 Indigenous video games and podcasts, and more; it's a course that integrates theory, hands-on digital humanities skills training and digital literacy, and critical thinking. The course provides a solid introduction to a range of topics related to Indigenous new media and the digital humanities, and also encourages students to question the colonial foundations and structures that undergird much of the technology and media we engage with on a daily basis. As a settler [End Page 75] scholar teaching New Media (NM) and the Digital Humanities (DH) from an Indigenous Studies perspective, I focus here on the central role of decolonization in this course—and refer to the wise words of Master Yoda as our decolonial Jedi master. introductory position As an English/Scottish-descended settler scholar teaching in Indigenous Studies, it's necessary for me to clearly state my self-positionality as an outsider to Indigenous knowledges, cultures, and ways of knowing. I must also acknowledge the deeply problematic settler histories from which I have personally benefitted, and that continue to negatively impact the lives of Indigenous peoples today. Though I was born and raised in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, it wasn't until I started my PhD at Simon Fraser University in 2014 that I began to understand the histories of genocide, dispossession, and assimilationist legislation that had contributed to my own comfortable upbringing. In my doctoral research, I attempted to engage in what Métis author Maria Campbell describes as kwaskastahsowin, or "putting things to right," to address the lasting impacts of colonial editorial interventions in Canada's publishing industry.5 My PhD combined elements of Indigenous Studies, English, and the Digital Humanities, and approached two key twentieth-century works of Indigenous women's writing in Canada (Legends of Vancouver and Halfbreed) with aims of acknowledging and ethically redressing their colonial histories of publication. In the classroom, I draw on the important lessons learned from my doctoral research, and also from teachings shared with me over the years from respected Indigenous faculty and mentors. I also look to the work of settler scholars like David Gaertner (UBC), who continue to model respectful, innovative approaches to teaching Indigenous Literatures and New Media. In my classes, we begin our work by acknowledging the Indigenous lands upon which we are gathered, and by positioning ourselves in relation to those lands. Anishinaabe scholar Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm argues that understanding one's position shows an awareness "of the colonial history that may come to bear upon the process and upon [one's] relationships with Indigenous writers" (32). As a settler scholar, [End Page 76] my position in relation to teaching Indigenous topics is...

О чем говорят сюжеты и мотивы литератур народов Сибири и Дальнего Востока ХХ века

The literatures of the indigenous peoples of Siberia, who had no written languages before the Soviet period, were the outcome of the state-sponsored project and were to become “national by their form and soviet by their content.” However, the authors, subjects, and topics of these literary texts were initially associated with a certain ethnonym, culture, and mentality. They were also isolated from other literature texts due to institutional and infrastructural reasons: the works of indigenous writers were published as special book series by specialized publishing houses. As a result, a corpus of literary texts with similar topics, subjects, plots, and motifs was formed. This similarity goes beyond the common sources in the mythology and folklore. The authors’ introspection on ethnical self-identification and writers’ reflections on the ill-fated disappearance of their cultures and peoples become the main plot and motif “generators” in books of the second half of the 20th century. The study has identified four main groups of plots: 1) childhood plots: everyday life descriptions including detailed descriptions of rites and rituals, the plot of a wise old man/woman’s death, the motifs of loss and memory, idyllic topoi; 2) hunting plots: the most common plot is about breaking a taboo or rule and the consequences; 3) shaman plots and related plots about journeys to other worlds, literal and symbolic, and oneiric motifs; 4) plots about interactions with outsiders. It is concluded that the literatures concerned proved to be mostly writers’ reflections on the fate of their peoples and native culture.

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Non-russian worldview in russian-language literature of autochthonous peoples of russian arctic (stylistic aspect)

For the first time, the article deals with the uniqueness of artistic consciousness and perception of the world and the features of conveying them by means of the Russian language using the example of the types of literature of the small-numbered peoples of the Russian Arctic. The authors' attempt to identify the features of the non-Russian perception of the world and the reflection of national life through the Russian language makes it possible to detect and analyze such types of bilingual creative work as conditional bilingualism and creative bilingualism in the artistic work of indigenous writers of the Russian Arctic. The historiography of the matter indicates that the problem of bilingualism in the prose of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Arctic has been poorly studied in national literary criticism.

Plant Life and More-than-human Agency in Zainab Amadahy’s Resistance

For centuries humans have acted as if the environment was passive and as if the agency was related only to human beings. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, scholars, and artists express the need to narrate tales about the multitudes of the living earth, which can help perceive the Earth as vibrant and living. The following paper discusses Black/Cherokee Zainab Amadahy’s speculative fiction novel 2013 Resistance as an example of a story resisting the claim about human beings as the ultimate species. The paper initially scrutinizes the phenomena of “plant blindness” and then explores how Zainab Amadahy illustrates plant life in her book. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, the writer presents tobacco as an active and responsive agent that influences the characters, which, consequently, opposes anthropocentrism. The article also addresses the cultural violence and disregard that has dominated the Western perception of animistic cultures and expresses the need to rethink the theory of animism. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by scholars including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Stacy Alaimo. It also refers to some of the most influential contributions to critical plant studies made by Indigenous thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’ s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards