Native Authors Research Articles

The Erotic in Contemporary Native Women’s Poetry in Canada Jennifer Andrews (bio) The erotic . . . “forms the bridge between the spiritual and the political.” . . . It is creation of a connection between an embodied self and the world in which that self exists. —ROBERT WARRIOR Native women’s love poetry and erotics are so invisible, so far back in the closet, that they are practically in somebody else’s apartment. —CHRYSTOS IN “RED HOT TO THE TOUCH,” Anishnaabe poet, editor, and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm argues for the need to “bring the erotic back into Indigenous arts” by depicting Aboriginal female sexuality, in particular, in a celebratory fashion (113). She eschews long-standing stereotypical depictions of Indigenous woman as passive objects of male exploitation and violence, especially as inflicted by white Western men as part of the ongoing project of colonization. Akiwenzie-Damm has collected and edited a groundbreaking collection of Indigenous erotica from writers of both sexes living in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) titled Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. She has also contributed to Drew Hayden Taylor’s Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality, a provocative and compelling compilation of essays and creative work on Indigenous sexualities. More recently, Playwrights Canada Press published Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances, a trio of performance scripts that include Muriel Miguel’s Hot’n’Soft, which first premiered in Toronto in 1991 and explicitly depicts “lesbian erotica” (xxi) by eschewing what Daniel Heath Justice has called the “sexaphobic settler regime” (208). And an essay in the just-published volume Indigenous Poetics in Canada, Anishnaabe poet and scholar Waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy describes the impact of many of these publications on her own work, highlighting how Akiwenzie-Damm and other Native writers of the erotic have inspired her to explore “our sexuality and sensuality, our way of writing our life force” (189). Despite this growing body of primary texts, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the popularity of Native erotica as manifested in the work of Indigenous women and especially poets within Canada. [End Page 134] This silence is not surprising, given that writing erotica is perceived as especially risky for Native authors who remain marginalized, regardless of their sexual orientation, within the nation-state. In “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body,” Chris Finley explains that while “Natives, and lots of other folks, like sex,” they “are terrified to discuss it” because it may endanger the speaker or writer by unearthing “the colonial legacies of sexual violence” (32) and their ongoing impact on tribal peoples. The structures of colonialism in Canada and the United States, as Mark Rifkin outlines, historically depended—and in many cases, still do—on the enforcement of “compulsory heterosexuality” (2011b, 5) to ensure the perpetuation of a fundamentally white, Christian, patriarchal form of nationhood, one in which any Indigenous “emotional and bodily sensation,” especially those which challenge established institutions of governance, is strategically discounted or ignored (2012, 27). Within this framework, Native women are useful for one purpose: to bear children, whose white fathers will ensure their racial integration. Conversely, Indigenous men are unacknowledged as subjects in their own right or they are feminized to induce their complicity. As Finley points out, “It is not only Native women who are (hetero)sexually controlled by white heteropatriarchy, for Native men are feminized and queered when put in the care of a white heteropatriarchal nation-state” (35). Paradoxically some of the most important recent critical interventions in the field of queer theory continue to rely on a “primitivist notion of the indigenous as the space of free and unfettered sexuality that allows the white queer citizen to remake his or her sexuality” without actually forging relationships of solidarity with Indigenous peoples when it comes to their “land struggles” (Smith, 49). For all the promise of queer theory’s desire to represent marginal populations, the colonization and erasure of Indigenous peoples remains a fundamental problem. Likewise, Andrea Smith notes that in much contemporary ethnic and queer of color work, Indigenous subjects who attach themselves to a land base or insist on “nationalistic identifications” rather than that of the diasporic or Mestizo subject are perceived as...

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The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú Mike Strayer The “delgado, inteligente, nervioso y . . . explosivo” Antonio Helú Atta lived as a newspaper and magazine editor, filmmaker, dramatist, and fiction writer known for his unabashed championing of the detective genre in Mexico (Villaurrutia 17). This largely-ignored father of Mexican detective fiction, however, also maintained deep, yet hitherto forgotten, ties with the Mexican avant-gardes. Helú’s involvement with both the Stridentists and the Contemporáneos not only informed his literary output but his radical, working-class politics, bridging the gap between literary avant-gardism and popular fiction. In his most famous novella La obligación de asesinar (1947), Helú develops an anarchistic hermeneutic for solving crime in which avant-garde free play out-deduces bourgeois reason. Through ad hoc investigations Helú’s detective – a lumpen thief named Carlos Miranda – brings into relief the failures of the Mexican Revolution and hints at alternative futures antagonistic towards private property regimes. Understanding Helú’s avant-garde affinities thus salvages his work from the dustbin of literary history by opening up certain radical possibilities for a literary mode, detective fiction, widely known for its hegemonic underpinnings. The Detective Mode South of the Border Most literary critics only consider Helú’s work important in relation to the broader genealogy of Mexican detective fiction. Speaking, for instance, of La obligación de asesinar, one literary scholar laments that “la importancia del libro es más documental que estética” (Negrín 40). For many critics, Helú’s work is only valuable in so far as it occupies what Ilan Stavans has called “the cornerstone of detective letters in Mexico” (75). Consequently, Stavans and other critics typically employ Helú’s literary biography in order [End Page 273] to contextualize the “literary explosion of this ‘subgenre’” during the nineteen seventies and eighties in Latin America (74). This is perhaps due in part to Mexican detective fiction’s perceived debt to foreign fonts of creative output, resulting in its misrecognition as, what Donald Yates calls, “a type of imported literature” practiced by so-called “native authors” (xi-xii). Notwithstanding the ivory-tower anthropology of Yates’s assessment, the empirical outcome is not all that surprising: a shallow pool of Helú scholarship. Over the past sixty years only a handful of academic books have treated either Helú or La obligación de asesinar in passing. Such is certainly the case with Persephone Braham’s Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons (2004) and Glen S. Close’s Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction (2008). The most recent academic book to reference Helú – Artful Assassins (2010) by Fernando Fabio Sánchez – continues in the mold of previous literary histories by situating Helú as the noble precursor to bigger and better things yet to come (61). Couple this with a Queen’s Quorum reference to La obligación de asesinar from 1948 where Helú is credited with “founding a south-of-the-border school of detection” and two or three websites, along with a few anthologies, and therein lies the extent of criticism devoted to Helú (125). This critical neglect is especially strange, however, considering the influence that Helú has exercised on generations of Mexican writers like Carlos Monsiváis – who authored the prologue to the latest compilation of Helú’s stories and novellas published by Porrúa in 1997. Monsiváis, in fact, praises Helú as “un autor que creyó radicalmente en la literatura policiaca y a ella consagró lo mejor de su activa, generosa vida profesional” (19). Fifty years earlier, in another prologue to Helú’s work, the avant-garde poet Xavier Villaurrutia enthusiastically commented “para la sed de los lectores de novelas policíacas, existe ya el pequeño oasis de los cuentos policíacas de Antonio Helú” (16).1 In other words, two of the most prominent Mexican intellectuals of the twentieth century have put their stamp of approval on Helú’s work, and yet no serious academic scholarship has paid him any due attention. Much critical ink, however, has been spilled on Latin American detective narratives that channel hard-boiled detective fiction, which “appears to be a [End Page 274] much more...

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Native Authors Research Articles

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Articles published on Native Authors

Table of Contents, Masthead, and Editor's Note

ANALYSIS OF ENERGY SAVING AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY ISSUES DURING OPERATION OF THE METRO ROLLING STOCK

Cartographies of the Voice: Storying the Land as Survivance in Native American Oral Traditions

Current issues of the professional preparation of the future social workers for the patronage work with elderly people

The role of prolactin аnd dopamine in the pathogenesis of endometriosis

Detecting Two-Spirit erotics: The fiction of Carole laFavor

Construir Y No Destruir (Build and Do Not Destroy): Tucson Resisting

The Analysis of Theoretical-Methodological Approaches to the Study of Family Institution

The Erotic in Contemporary Native Women’s Poetry in Canada

Imaginary Indians: Representations of Native Americans in Scholastic Reading Club

Selection criteria for scientific periodicals for publication the manuscript in field of morphology. In help for author.

Interactive Markers in Medical Research Articles Written by Iranian and Native Authors of ISI and Non-ISI Medical Journals: A Contrastive Metadiscourse Analysis of Method Section

English

Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas

Where Have the Dead Gone? And Other Poems by Shiv K. Kumar

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú

Bowman Books: A Gathering Place for Indigenous New England

Indigenous: It Depends How You Look at It. What You Call It. How You Live It.

Interactional Markers in English Medical Research Articles Written by Iranian and Native Authors: A Contrastive Metadiscourse Analysis of Method Section

Active and Passive Voice Constructions by Indonesian Student Writers

Lead the way for us

Editage

Paperpal

R Discovery

Mind the Graph

Native Authors Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Native Authors

Table of Contents, Masthead, and Editor's Note

ANALYSIS OF ENERGY SAVING AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY ISSUES DURING OPERATION OF THE METRO ROLLING STOCK

Cartographies of the Voice: Storying the Land as Survivance in Native American Oral Traditions

Current issues of the professional preparation of the future social workers for the patronage work with elderly people

The role of prolactin аnd dopamine in the pathogenesis of endometriosis

Detecting Two-Spirit erotics: The fiction of Carole laFavor

Construir Y No Destruir (Build and Do Not Destroy): Tucson Resisting

The Analysis of Theoretical-Methodological Approaches to the Study of Family Institution

The Erotic in Contemporary Native Women’s Poetry in Canada

Imaginary Indians: Representations of Native Americans in Scholastic Reading Club

Selection criteria for scientific periodicals for publication the manuscript in field of morphology. In help for author.

Interactive Markers in Medical Research Articles Written by Iranian and Native Authors of ISI and Non-ISI Medical Journals: A Contrastive Metadiscourse Analysis of Method Section

English

Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas

Where Have the Dead Gone? And Other Poems by Shiv K. Kumar

The Avant-Garde Detective Fiction of Antonio Helú

Bowman Books: A Gathering Place for Indigenous New England

Indigenous: It Depends How You Look at It. What You Call It. How You Live It.

Interactional Markers in English Medical Research Articles Written by Iranian and Native Authors: A Contrastive Metadiscourse Analysis of Method Section

Active and Passive Voice Constructions by Indonesian Student Writers