engleski

"The Book as a 'Contact Zone' - Textualizing Orality in James Welch’s 'Fools Crow'"

The paper examines strategies of cultural and historical revisionism in James Welch's novel Fools Crow (1986). Maneuvering the conventions of Western narrativity and its most popular agency – the book, the novel exhibits what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin term as “abrogation” and “appropriation” of Western symbols. The most dominant such strategy in Fools Crow is the textualization of oral tradition. Even though it seemingly follows Western tradition of the identity narrative, Fools Crow suppresses its conventions through a number of conceptual turns. Bringing to life a whole tribal tradition of rituals, hunting, storytelling and dreaming, Welch's text accurately illustrates Native American history, culture, social organization and gender roles, recreates the ancient world of oral wisdom and cosmology, and draws us into Blackfeet conception of the world. Blurring the boundary between the narrative and the myth, history and ceremony, it creates a resonance between the material, spiritual and mythopoeic immanent to the indigenous worldview, paralyzing the intention of the dominant genre. Thereupon, as oral tradition in disguise, Welch's book both probes and expands the limits of textuality and Western discourse. As a counter-history, incorporating suppressed cultural memory and "the wounds" of history, the oral matrix destabilizes the authority of the colonial meta-narrative, as well. As such, it serves as an effective tool of both conceptual and anti- imperial translation.

James Welch ; Fools Crow ; book ; contact zone ; orality ; counter-history

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