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Since the beginning of the so-called 'Native American Renaissance' in the late
1960s, literature by indigenous writers of the United States has undergone a tremendous
development both with regard to the number and quality of works of fiction, poetry,
drama and nonfictional prose published and to their formal and thematic variety
and inventiveness. The same holds true of other forms of cultural expression.
Similiar tendencies can be observed in Canada and Latin America. Imaginary
(Re-)Locations collects a number of essays by leading American and German
critics in the field and some recent literary texts by Native writers Kim Blaeser,
Jeane Breinig, Julie Coburn, Gordon Henry, Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Emma Lee Warrior.
The scholarly papers study contemporary indigenous literature and culture from
the United States as well as from Canada and Mexico. They address literary representations
of such aspects as cultural and political identity formation, the position of
Urban Indians, mixedblood identity and cultural transdifference, 'postindian'
tricksterism, and the deconstruction of Hollywood Indians; in addition, they discuss
Native and non-Native images, symbolic border zones, and the marketability of
things Indian. Among the writers discussed in these essays are Louise Erdrich,
Thomas King, N. Scott Momaday, Louis Owens, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor,
who also contributed a scholarly essay of his own.
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