engleski

Crossing Stories, Crossing Cultures: Hybrid Spaces in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

This paper analyzes the hybridity as a postcolonial strategy in Louise Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine. Pluralizing the real in a typically postmodern way, Love Medicine demonstrates hybridity on both the poetological and hermeneutical planes. Subsuming postmodern narrative conventions into a native epistemology, Erdrich navigates between the two symbolic systems, dynamizing conceptual dialogue and the postcolonial effect of appropriation, abrogation, and rearticulation of Western symbols. Through the procedures of discontinuity, permutation, contradiction, repetition, and excess, she invites multiperspectivity, fragmentation, and narrative disintegration to emphasize the unity of characters, motifs, and themes, as well as the episodic and cyclical nature of oral storytelling. In the process, Erdrich’s text pursues conceptual translation and mediation, dissolves its own horizon of reception, and reeducates its audience, positioning the Western reader as a recipient of oral storytelling. In this way Erdrich utilizes the postmodern procedure and the concept of an active reader to stimulate the ontological switch. Using the technique of the short-circuit and the postmodern assumption of the constructed nature of identity, akin to the trickster discourse, she challenges the imperial figuration of Indianness, deconstructing the trope of the “Vanishing Indian.” Thereby, she manifests the decolonizing potential of postmodern discourse.

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, postmodernism, decolonizing

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