Red Readings:
Decolonization through Native-centric Responses
to Non-Native
Film and Literature
SCOTT ANDREWS
The idea for this issue of Transmotion came
from the bottom of the sea. While watching the 2014 film Godzilla, I was struck by ways in which the famous lizard's battle
with a flying, radiation-eating monster resembled the dynamic relationship
between the Anishinaabe creatures of mishibizhiiw (water monster) and animikii
(thunder beings). I wrote up my thoughts then about those similarities in a
blog posting titled "Godzilla is Red: An American Indian Reading of the King of
Monsters" (Andrews).
This issue's theme became more fully
developed when I proposed a "Red Readings" panel for the Native American
Literature Symposium in 2015. This issue's essays from Becca
Gercken and Ken Roemer were presented in shorter
versions then; at that session Margaret Noodin
presented a paper on Sapho and Gertrude Stein, but
for this issue she focuses only on Stein. I proposed "Red Reading Rides Again"
for the 2017 NALS, and Shawaano Chad Uran presented a shorter version of his essay on The Land of the Dead. Both sessions were
well-attended, and they provided lively, intelligent,
and often funny presentations. Brian Burkhart submitted his re-imagining of
John Locke's work through the Cherokee trickster of Jisdu
independent of those sessions, but he will present it at NALS this year on a
panel devoted to Cherokee culture. So I want to thank the organizers of the
Native American Literature Symposium for indulging me and creating a space to
conduct such thought experiments. I encourage people interested in native
literature, film, and art to consider attending the annual event (https://nativelit.com/).
First I should say the name "red reading"
is not an attempt to racialize or essentialize
a particular literary response. I thought of the name simply to create a catchy
title for my panel at the symposium. The reader does not need to be native for
this practice, but the reading should be native-centric; the reading process
should be grounded in issues important to native communities and/or native
intellectual histories or practices. Put most simply, a red reading produces an
interpretation of a non-native text from a native perspective.
Once
I came up with the title for the panel, I discovered that James Cox had used
this phrase in his book Muting White
Noise (attributing it to Jill Carter's 2010 doctoral dissertation). For
Cox, a red reading re-interprets representations of native people in non-native
texts; this "is an act of liberation from the imaginative foundations of
colonialism" (9), and he demonstrates several such readings in his book. (I also learned that Daniel Heath Justice had used the phrase in
his chapter of Indigenizing the Academy, but
he used it to describe centering college classrooms
on texts by native authors.)
For
my NALS panels and for this issue of Transmotion, my approach to a red reading is different from
Cox's. While his fine book deconstructs narratives about American Indians that
enable colonization (narratives that have been weaponized
against native people), the red readings in this issue work in one or more ways:
they reveal the pervasive mechanisms of settler colonialism in American
culture; they re-imagine those mechanisms in order to resist and alter them; they
build bridges between native literatures and canonical American literature, but
they do so by placing native perspectives at the center of the discussion; and
they are imaginative and playful. The essays in this issue were written in the
same spirit that Kimberly Blaeser describes for the
works of Gerald Vizenor: they are dedicated to "liberation, imagination, play, and
discourse." In Gerald Vizenor: Writing
in the Oral Tradition, she claims: "His writing seeks to function as
both the presentation of an idea and as an invitation to discover where that
idea might lead, an invitation to engage in a dialogue" (4).
How
do they do that? By interpreting, re-interpreting, transposing, or
deconstructing non-native texts from a native perspective, sometimes playfully
and sometimes seriously. What happens when you read a non-native text
from a native perspective? What disruptions in a text are made possible
by reading it with native assumptions? What latent meanings can
become apparent? What new meanings can be produced?
I
think of red reading as similar to "queering," which also is an invitation to
discover where ideas might lead. In the introduction to a special issue of Art Journal in 1996, Jonathan Weinberg
wrote that queering things such as works of art or literature has the objective
of "making them strange in order to destabilize our confidence in the
relationship of representation to identity, authorship, and behavior" (12).
Making things strange in this way was part of a larger effort by queer artists
and academics to "investigate the mechanisms by which a society claims to know
gender and sexuality" (11).
Weinberg's
description of queering parallels Cox's goal for red reading. A red reading can
destabilize the dominant culture's confidence in the relationship of its
representations of American Indians to actual native people. In this sense it
also is similar to what Gerald Vizenor called
"trickster hermeneutics," which is the process by which those representations
of American Indians are deconstructed as tools for dispossessing native people
of their lands, identities, and political and cultural sovereignty. Trickster
hermeneutics is a corrective to the misrepresentations fostered by the dominant
culture, and those misrepresentations are elements of what Vizenor
called "Manifest Manners," the methods by which the United States of America
tries to realize its dreams of Manifest Destiny. Trickster hermeneutics and
other examinations of race representations are (to again echo Weinberg's
language) efforts to investigate the mechanics by which the dominant culture of
the United States claims to know race, including whiteness – since the
role of the Indian in many representations is to be the Other against which American
whiteness defines itself.
The
essays in this issue do not try to destabilize representations of American
Indians; instead, they seek to destabilize, among other things, the dominant
culture's confidence in representations of itself. That includes, for example,
destabilizing fundamental conceptions upon which America's settler colonial
nationhood has been built; Burkhart does this by imagining Jisdu
(Rabbit, the Cherokee trickster) helping correct John Locke's thinking. It also
includes shaking the dominant culture's assumption that its literary canon is
the standard against which all others are measured; Noodin
and Roemer do this when they measure canonical authors (Gertrude Stein and Walt
Whitman) according to native standards. The essays in this issue also
investigate the mechanisms by which the dominant culture knows nationhood and
the narratives that enable it.
But back to queering. Craig Womack also sees an affinity between
queer and native responses to texts, and he also sees the trickster potential
of such responses. In the last chapter of Red
on Red, Womack writes: "Also, the thinking behind the term 'queer,' which
seems to celebrate deviance rather than apologize for it, seems embodied with
trickster's energy to push social boundaries" (301). Reading non-native texts
from a native perspective similarly celebrates the difference between the native
and the non-native, between native epistemologies and a settler colonial state
that seeks to erase or appropriate them. In that chapter, Womack interprets the
play The Cherokee Night by Lynn Riggs
through a queer lens; Womack suggests that Riggs conflates Cherokee identity
with homosexuality in the play – native and queer being things oppressed
by the mainstream and things repressed by some people who are native and/or
queer but who wish to live in that mainstream. Womack suggests homosexual
desires and denials are never named in the play but greatly influence the
play's plot and the actions of its characters – a reading that Riggs, as
a closeted homosexual, perhaps would have denied. This is trickster-like since
Womack evokes meanings the original speaker would have not intended, twisting a
speaker's words into a different message – perhaps even into the truth
(or another truth). Gercken does this with "The
Yellow Wallpaper" and Uran does it with The Land of the Dead. Like Womack
reading The Cherokee Night through a
queer lens, they read their texts through a lens of settler colonialism. Womack
asks something like this: "What if Riggs's lived experience as a closeted gay
man influenced the content of his play?" Gercken and Uran ask, "What if being immersed in a colonizing culture
influenced Perkins and Romero in the creation of their narratives, even in ways
they would not have recognized?" While the native-centric readings offered in
this issue of Transmotion
may not upset social boundaries (I doubt they will offend anyone), they imaginatively
push on intellectual or academic boundaries.
Reading
non-native texts from a native perspective can be seen as part of the larger
project of cultural studies and criticism. That project tries to understand
cultures through their various expressions and representations (including
"high" and "low" culture, such as canonical literature and Hollywood films or
Gothic cathedrals and Las Vegas casinos). In their contribution to What is Cultural Studies?, John Frow
and Meagan Morris state that cultural studies examines
... practices, institutional structures and the complex forms of
agency they entail, legal, political, and financial conditions of existence,
and particular flows of power and knowledge, as well as a particular
multilayered semantic organisation; it is an
ontologically mixed entity, and one for which there can be no privileged or
"correct" reading. It is this, more than anything else, that forces cultural
studies' attention to the diversity of audiences for or users of the structures
of textuality it analyses - that is, to the open-ended
social life of texts..." (355-356).
Native-centric readings add another voice
to the diversity of audiences that Frow and Morris
mention. The readings may consider non-native texts, but they are texts likely
to be experienced by native readers, whether directly in a school classroom or
on a television screen, or indirectly through the governmental policies
established upon or supported by them.
If
we understand red reading as a kind of reverse-appropriation (the colonized
stealing from the colonizer and repurposing those cultural tools), we can also
acknowledge that many acts of interpretation are a kind of appropriation, even
when no cultural boundaries are crossed. Much of cultural studies (including
literary criticism) examines texts from the past, and
we can understand those interpretations as a kind of appropriation through
time. While an interpretation may claim to uncover new facts about old texts, it may instead produce new uses for them, regardless of their
original meanings. Herbert Grabes wrote something
similar to this in "Literary History and Cultural History Relations and
Differences":
And we know
that the signifiers of the past lend themselves not only to an attribution of
meanings informed by a knowledge of the culture within
which they were produced. Their selection and interpretation are also subject
to the inclinations and needs of the later culture within which they are newly
approached. The functional history of literature will therefore also have to
integrate the history of reception – at least in part – a history
of "misreading"; which is, of course, only a misreading in respect to its being
different from the one most likely at the time of the texts' production. (28)
If what Grabes
says is true, then we could say that a functional history of American
literature will need to integrate a history of native reception or native "misreadings." How does a native perspective make sense of
non-native texts? What uses can a native perspective find for a text that was
not produced with it in mind? For instance, Gercken's pleasurable misreading of "The Yellow Wallpaper"
in this issue. A native perspective could find that short story to be a
useful allegory for experiences with federal Indian policy. Who cares what
Charlotte Perkins Gilman intended with her story?
The
first version of my panel title for NALS was "Red Reader Response" (I changed
it simply to make the panel title shorter), and Grabes's
emphasis on the importance of reception in literary history and criticism
illustrates how this issue's theme arises from interpretative methods such as
Reader Response Criticism. In fact, I consulted Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism in
preparing this introduction. Several ideas from that famous book are helpful in
describing the goal of the essays in this issue, but I will discuss only one
here. It comes from Walker Gibson and his chapter titled "Authors, Speakers,
Readers, and Mock Readers." Gibson states that each text has two readers: the
actual human who is reading and a mock reader "whose mask and costume the
individual takes on" (2) to participate in the imaginative experience being
created by the text. Sometimes this could involve the actual reader pretending
to be a character in an author's fictional universe, such as when Nanapush in Louise Erdrich's Tracks tells stories to his
granddaughter, Lulu; this includes directly addressing her, but the actual
reader knows she is not present; the actual readers are pretending at some
level to be Lulu and trying to imagine her responses to Nanapush's
stories while also tracking their own responses. A different example would be
readers of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Her novel famously is built from Laguna Pueblo cultural
capital that most readers do not possess, relying as it does upon Pueblo
beliefs and storytelling traditions. Silko's mock
reader is steeped in Laguna Pueblo history and culture, and the actual readers
must realize there is much they are missing from the experience of reading the
novel. (We hope that actual readers are persuaded to learn some about that
history and culture and then return to the novel to more
fully appreciate its artistry and its message.)
Of
course, Gibson had neither Erdrich nor Silko in mind when he wrote "Authors, Speakers, Readers,
and Mock Readers." The examples in his chapter come from American canonical
authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But in considering
the reception of various texts by a mock reader, including the challenges that
some texts present for mock readers, Gibson makes a statement that is relevant
to red readings. He writes: "A bad book, then, is a book in whose mock reader
we discover a person we refuse to become, a mask we refuse to put on, a role we
will not play" (5). We can easily imagine native readers being uncomfortable
with the masks a settler colonial text asks them to wear, even those texts that
do not involve representations of native people. We can imagine, for example, native
readers refusing to share the spoken and unspoken assumptions made by John
Locke in his "Second Treatise on Civil Government." We can imagine their
alienating experience of reading that and other texts in the canon of
literature produced by settler colonial nations. We also can imagine the useful
exercise of non-natives reading those same texts as a native mock reader, using
a native perspective to defamiliarize their own
cultural texts. Perhaps if more non-native readers examined the works in their
canon from a native perspective they would be liberated from some of the
dangerous ideas found there.
Works Cited
Andrews, Scott. "Godzilla is Red: An
American Indian Reading of
the King of Monsters." May 24, 2014.
http://scottseesthings.blogspot.com/2014/05/godzilla-is-red-american-indian-reading.html
Blaeser, Kimberly. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral
Tradition. U of Oklahoma P, 1996.
Carter, Jill. Repairing the Web: Spiderwoman's Children Staging
the New Human Being. Dissertation,
University of Toronto, 2010.
Frow, John and
Meagan Morris.
"Australian Cultural Studies."What is Cultural Studies?: A Reader, edited by
Gibson, Walker. "Authors, Speakers,
Readers, and Mock Readers."
Reader-Response Criticism: From
Formalism to Post-Structuralism, edited by Jane P.
Tompkins. Johns Hopkins U P, 1980, pp. 1-6.
Grabes, Herbert. "Literary History and Cultural
History:
Justice, Daniel Heath. “Seeing (and Reading) Red: Indian Outlaws in the Ivory Tower.” Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, edited by Devon Abbot Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, U of Nebraska P, 2004, pp. 100-123.
Weinberg, Jonathan. "Things Are Queer." Art Journal (Winter
1996) pp. 11-14.
Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism.
U of Minnesota P, 1999.