American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest--among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel. Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.

Author: Eric Gary Anderson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 02/01/1999
Pages: 239
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.90h x 6.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780292704886

Review Citation(s):
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/2000 pg. 77 - Recommended/Regional General
Library Journal 04/01/1999

About the Author
Anderson, Eric Gary: - Eric Gary Anderson is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, where he teaches American and Native American literatures.