Postindian survivance and the trickster condition of in-betweenness: reading Sherman Alexie and Gerald Vizenor in the world of postmodernism.

Abstract

postmodern critical approaches to the literary refiguring of Native American identity in the post-Native American Renaissance period have started to redesign a new field of inquiry, namely that of non-traditionalist, de-anthropologized, poststructurealist, criticism that seeks to explore the links between contemporary experience and the problem of "survivance" in the play of simulations. "Survivance," a term coined by the Native American writer and literary critic Gerald Vizenor, indicates the combination of survival and resistance techniques by which Native Americans face the challenges of a world structured around simulations of Indian identity, but in which the native subjects can respond by re-shaping and re-appropriating these stories in order to create a Baudrillardian implosion of meaning. This thesis will attempt to investigate the contributions in fiction and film made by Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene author and director, as an instance of interstitial autoethnographic discourse of survivance, conceived as driven by trickster hermeneutics and involved in a process of revisioning the textual dimension of a culturally hybrid world.