Consuming, Incarcerating, and “Transmoting” Misery: Border Practice in Vizenor’s Bearheart and Jones’s The Fast Red Road

Authors

  • Cathy Covell Waegner University of Siegen, Germany

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.218

Keywords:

Native American, Transmotion, Postmodern, Border Practice

Abstract

Drawing on Gerald Vizenor's complex notion of "transmotion" and concepts from carceral theory, an intertextual reading of two rich, initial novels by first and second-generation postmodern Native writers, namely Gerald Vizenor's seminal Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990; first published in 1978 as Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart) and Stehen Graham Jones's The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (2000), reveals both systemic miseries and strategies for combatting them. In the two novels, brutal imagery and experience of cannibalization, enclosure, and displacement menace the Native protagonists, but, paradoxically, these strong images also offer modes of resourceful and imaginative action - for my purposes here particularly at territorial borders - which enable totemic laughter and viable Native "survivance," to use Vizenor's own much-quoted term.

Recent carceral theory tells us that the mapping of imprisonment must include a differentiated study of "practice" as well as of enclosed space and enforced borders (cf. Dominique Moran, 2015). Indeed, the border crossing in the two books at hand encodes centuries of discriminatory practice based on dangerously fixed stereotypes, demarcation of ethnic boundaries, and binary "terminal creeds" that Gerald Vizenor has always critiqued in his oeuvre. The miserable but epiphanic realization by Pidgin, one of Jones's protagonists, in yet another 'win-or-lose' trap that he "was consumed" (153) echoes on many levels in a synergetic analysis of the two experimental and engagé novels, which nonetheless demonstrate the creativity, transformation, convention defiance, the wisely grotesque clowning and trickery, the imagination involved in crafting and enabling Native transmotion.  

Author Biography

Cathy Covell Waegner, University of Siegen, Germany

CATHY COVELL WAEGNER taught in the English Department of the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in July 2013. She obtained degrees from the College of William & Mary (BA) and the University of Virginia (MA, PhD). In addition to her work on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, she has published on Native American themes, transculturality in the ethnic bildungsroman, minstrelsy, AfroAsian "postmodernist passing," 400 years after Jamestown, "hybrid tropes" in film, new diasporas, palimpsestic trajectories on the "ethnic shore," and the interaction between American and European cultural phenomena. Waegner edited a volume in the American Indian Studies Series (Michigan State University Press) in 2015 called Mediating Indianness, co-edited a project volume with Norfolk State University scholars, Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other: "From-Heres" and "Come-Heres" in Virginia and North Rhine-Westphalia (2011), as well as, with colleagues from Université d'Orléans, Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas (2002). She served as MESEA (Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) treasurer for four years. Her current research focuses on contemporary Native American literature, specifically in connection with issues of globalization.
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Published

2017-12-06

How to Cite

Waegner, C. C. (2017). Consuming, Incarcerating, and “Transmoting” Misery: Border Practice in Vizenor’s Bearheart and Jones’s The Fast Red Road. Transmotion, 3(2), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.218

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2017)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Cathy Covell Waegner

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