The Indian in American Southern Literature

Explores the abundance of Native American representations in US Southern literature.

Melanie Benson Taylor (Author)

9781108495318, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 July 2020

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.57 kg

Indians are everywhere and nowhere in the US South. Cloaked by a rhetoric of disappearance after Indian Removal, actual southeastern tribal groups are largely invisible but immortalized in regional mythologies, genealogical lore, romanticized stereotypes, and unpronounceable place names. These imaginary 'Indians' compose an ideological fiction inextricable from that of the South itself. Often framed as hindrances to the Cotton Kingdom, Indians were in fact active participants in the plantation economy and chattel slavery before and after Removal. Dialectical tropes of Indigeneity linger in the white southern imagination in order to both conceal and expose the tangle of land, labor, and race as formative, disruptive categories of being and meaning. This book is not, finally, about the recovery of the region's lost Indians, but a reckoning with their inaccessible traces, ambivalent functions, and the shattering implications of their repressed significance for modern southern identity.

Introduction. Once removed: genealogies of an Indian imaginary
1. Doom and deliverance: William Faulkner's dialectical Indians
2. Confederate spirits: Katherine Anne Porter's bewitching Indians
3. The dark eye: Barry Hannah's terminal Indians
Conclusion. The puppet show is not over
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]