American Indian Literature and the Southwest:
Contexts and Dispositions

Eric Gary Anderson
University of Texas Press, 1999

From Library Journal: "Anderson...explores aspects of the literature of the Southwestern United States. Special attention is paid to encounters between the many cultures of the area: various Native American tribes, Euro-American groups, and, in Roswell, NM, even extraterrestrials. Anderson analyzes a wide range of "cultural texts," from George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip and Geronimo's autobiography to the novels of Leslie Marmon Silko, Willa Cather, and A.A. Carr. Anderson explores a range of conceptions of the Southwest in this thoughtful and complex work while incorporating myriad scholarly references into the text...."

Gwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Migration and Displacement in the American Southwest
• Chapter 1 -- Mobile Homes: Migration and Resistance in American Indian Literature
• Chapter 2 -- Unsettling Frontiers: Billy the Kid and the Outlaw Southwest
• Chapter 3 -- Outlawing Apaches: Geronimo and Jason Betzinez
• Chapter 4 -- Photography as Resistance in Almanac of the Dead
• Chapter 5 -- Indian Detours, or, Where the Indians Aren't: Management and Preservation in the Euro-American Southwest
• Chapter 6 -- Driven to Extraction: McTeague in the Desert
• Chapter 7 -- Mary Austin, Sarah Winnemucca, and the Problems of Authority
• Chapter 8 -- Cleaning out the House: Tom Outland, Dead Indians, and the First World War
• Chatper 9 -- Krazy Kat I: Contexts and Crossings
• Chapter 10 -- Krazy Kat II: Navajo Aesthetics
• Conclusion: Cross-Purposes and Purposeful Crossings

From the Back Cover

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest--among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel.

Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.

 

Reviews

"American Indian Literature and the Southwest is a well-managed tour de force replete with more pleasant surprises than a short review can possibly convey. This book both broadens and deepens our understanding of the Southwest and the diverse feats of imagination that it continues to inspire."—Catherine Rainwater, Texas Books in Review

"I know of no other book that ranges as widely over the field of the 'Southwest,' understood as an aesthetic construct. . . .At its best (which is almost always), Anderson's writing is lively, witty, engaging, provocative, readable."—Robert M. Nelson, University of Richmond

"What it accomplishes in giving readers an insight into the postcolonial condition that has always existed in the Southwest is invaluable."—Linda Townley Woodson, American Literature

"One of those rare critical books which legitimately employs the methodology promoted by its thesis. . . .While this book rewards careful reading from those familiar with the texts being discussed, it provocatively suggests fresh demeanors for approaching literature concerning the Southwest for those with little knowledge of the actual texts to which Anderson alludes. Carefully balanced between theory and literary analysis. . .a successful and insightful book."—Jennifer McKellar, World Literature in Review