Injun Joe's Ghost: The Indian Mixed-blood in American WritingUniversity of Missouri Press, 2004 - 271 pages What does it mean to be a "mixed-blood," and how has our understanding of this term changed over the last two centuries? What processes have shaped American thinking on racial blending? Why has the figure of the mixed-blood, thought too offensive for polite conversation in the nineteenth century, become a major representative of twentieth-century native consciousness? In Injun Joe's Ghost, Harry J. Brown addresses these questions within the interrelated contexts of anthropology, U.S. Indian policy, and popular fiction by white and mixed-blood writers, mapping the evolution of "hybridity" from a biological to a cultural category. Brown traces the processes that once mandated the mixed-blood's exile as a grotesque or criminal outcast and that have recently brought about his ascendance as a cultural hero in contemporary Native American writing. Because the myth of the demise of the Indian and the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxon is traditionally tied to America's national idea, nationalist literature depicts Indian-white hybrids in images of degeneracy, atavism, madness, and even criminality. A competing tradition of popular writing, however, often created by mixed-blood writers themselves, contests these images of the outcast half-breed by envisioning "hybrid vigor," both biologically and linguistically, as a model for a culturally heterogeneous nation. Injun Joe's Ghost focuses on a significant figure in American history and culture that has, until now, remained on the periphery of academic discourse. Brown offers an in-depth discussion of many texts, including dime novels and Depression-era magazine fiction, that have been almost entirely neglected by scholars. This volume also covers texts such as the historical romances of the 1820s and the novels of the twentieth-century "Native American Renaissance" from a fresh perspective. Investigating a broad range of genres and subject over two hundred year of American writing, Injun Joe's Ghost will be useful to students and professionals in the fields of American literature, popular culture, and native studies. |
Contents
Antebellum Historical Romance | 27 |
From Biological to Cultural Hybridity | 150 |
Nostalgia and Degenerationism | 158 |
Race as Biology in the Saturday Evening Post | 166 |
The Test of Language Redefinition and Reorganization | 173 |
Oliver La Farges Navajo Stories | 181 |
Hybrid Subjectivity in Cogewea | 190 |
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Common terms and phrases
Allotment American literature Antebellum Historical Romance anthropology assimilation biological Boddo captivity century Chal character child civilization claims Cogewea consciousness Cooper criminal critics cultural Danforth death dialectical dime novel Dime Western discourse Erdrich Farge father Franz Boas frontier full-blood Gerald Vizenor gothic Half-Blood half-breed Hobomok Hope Leslie hybrid degeneracy identity imagined Indian and white Indian blood Indian-white Injun Joe’s Ghost interracial Jackson Jefferson Joaquín Murieta Joe's Kaam language later linguistic Louise Erdrich Magawisca Malaeska marriage Mary Jemison Mathews McNickle McWhorter miscegenation mixed-blood Mohicans Momaday Mourning Mourning Dove Murieta myth narrative nationalist Native American nature nineteenth nineteenth-century Oneco political polygenist Poynter race racial blending racial mixing racialist Ramona readers Redlaw represents reservation Ridge Saturday Evening Post savage Scheick scholars Sedgwick Seneca Silko simultaneously Squaw story suggests Sundown synthesis texts tion traditional tribal tribes twentieth Twentieth-Century Magazine Fiction Vizenor Wacora white and Indian white woman wife William Apess writing