engleski

Native American Fiction as a ‘Contact Zone’: Textualising Orality in James Welch’s Fools Crow

The paper discusses the techniques of cultural and historical revisionism in James Welch’s novel Fools Crow (1986). It argues that even though it seemingly embraces Western representational modes, Welch’s novel integrates oral tradition into fiction by bringing to life the ancient world of Blackfeet lore, its holistic cosmology, and social values as well as its intricate tradition of rituals, storytelling, and dreaming, and thus it simultaneously both undermines dominant conventions and enacts a number of conceptual turns. The analysis examines the novel’s strategies of abrogation and appropriation in order to show that by blurring the boundary between fiction, history, and myth, it effects a resonance between the material and the spiritual immanent to the Indigenous worldview and ultimately paralyses the intention of the dominant genre. Employing Holm et al.’s Peoplehood Matrix, the paper contends that the novel’s oral subtext not only challenges and redefines the boundaries of fiction but that, by reopening the wounds of history embodied in Blackfeet collective memory, it also subverts the metanarrative of Euro-American historiography, generating both conceptual and anti-imperial translation.

James Welch ; Fools Crow ; oral tradition ; Peoplehood Matrix ; abrogation ; appropriation ; conceptual translation ; contrapuntal historiography

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