Criticism

09-4-0379

Fast, Robin Riley. The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000. 252 pp. ISBN 0-472-11077-2, $42.50.

This volume presents an analytical survey of contemporary American Indian poets and their works. Borrowing from current theories of Anzaldúa’s borderlands and Bakhtin’s dialogics, Fast sets up a thematic rubric, then inserts examples from a wide spectrum of poets to illustrate her premise.

The themes of Fast’s study derive from patterns and issues in many Native cultures: orality, community, audience, place, spirituality, storytelling, history, and colonial concerns. In addressing each of these topics, Fast shows her facility and broad knowledge of American Indian poetry and critical context. She easily discusses well-known authors: Simon Ortiz (Acoma), Wendy Rose (Hopi), Joy Harjo (Creek), Linda Hogan (Chicasaw), Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene), and Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), the last more renowned for fiction writing. An important contribution of this book is the introduction and discussion of less familiar poets such as Robert Davis (Tlingit-Kake). Having been exposed to the primary themes, the reader should then return to the original sources, as suggested in a supplemental bibliography, where an abundance of American Indian poetry additionally addresses political and tribal concerns.

—P. Jane Hafen
University of Nevada–Las Vegas

09-4-0380

Williams, Roland L., Jr. African American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. 176 pp. ISBN 0-313-30585-4, $52.95.

Williams, an assistant professor of literature at Temple University, makes a sound argument for considering African-American autobiographies, particularly slave narratives, within the American tradition of autobiographical writings rather than as a separate genre. Williams makes his case by effectively pairing slave narratives with selected pieces of Euro-American writing: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast; and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. Williams makes his argument that these black and white writers alike draw on an epic tradition of heroism, in which the protagonist/speaker struggles for freedom and self-determination, and accomplishes these goals partly through literacy and learning.

Williams intends his book as a corrective to the prevailing Black Studies view of African-American writings as antithetical to mainstream American culture, and African American Autobiography does delineate strong similarities between the texts that it pairs. Thus, it makes a good case for reading slave narratives as central to the prevailing American tradition of self-writing; yet such a reading must, unfortunately, sometimes minimize the differences that race imposes on the lives described by the writers. Williams’s book is accessible, even though sentences are occasionally convoluted, and this book would be appropriate for college libraries and for students and scholars of American and African-American literatures.

—Rachel Stein
Siena College

09-4-0381

Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999. 288 pp. ISBN 0-8166-3023-2, $18.95 (pb).

In a continuation of Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior’s call for tribal and intellectual sovereignty, Creek-Cherokee Womack has produced a groundbreaking literary work. Not only does Womack develop a theoretical foundation for tribal criticisms, but he also applies this theory in a series of insightful critical essays. Each essay has a fictional coda and dialogue with a hysterically funny letter that plays with Creek characters and authors. Womack argues that to understand American Indian literatures, the writings must be viewed in a context of specific tribal nations and cultures. For examples he expounds on Muscogee/Creek history, storytelling and the works of Creek writers Alice Callahan, Alexander Posey, Louis Oliver, and Joy Harjo.

The last chapter switches to Womack’s Cherokee ties in an innovative presentation of the Cherokee Nation by Lynn Riggs (author of Green Grow the Lilacs, basis for the musical Oklahoma!). Womack explains Riggs’s double coding of both his Cherokee and gay identities. This work is a stunning model of how Indian scholars can explicate tribal-specific oral and written works with an understanding of the political ramifications for real Indian peoples. Womack convincingly and clearly explains how contemporary literary theories are inadequate and colonial for American Indian literatures. His application of tribal-based criticism is brilliant.

—P. Jane Hafen
University of Nevada–Las Vegas