Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays - Softcover

Riggs, Lynn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554815916 ISBN 13: 9781554815913

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2024

Synopsis

Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays bundles critically edited texts of three thematically allied plays with an extensive primary, secondary, and textual apparatus. The Cherokee Night (1932), comprising seven asynchronous scenes set between 1895 and 1931, is Riggs’s most experimental play. Its Cherokee characters inhabit a history of dispossession and violence, including the dissolution of the Cherokee Nation with Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Their daily survival constitutes the apex of resistance. Not so for the Indigenes of The Year of Pilar (1938), the most radical American Indian text prior to the Native American renaissance that began in the late 1960s. Here, Yucatecan Mayans take a government program of land reform as an opportunity to reclaim their homeland and punish settler-colonialists for centuries of enslavement, torture, and sexual violence. Riggs returns to Indian Territory in The Cream in the Well (1941), set on the eve of Oklahoma statehood. The Cherokee Sawters family responds to the onset of statehood by lamenting lost opportunities and fretting about an uncertain future.

About this title

About the Author

James H. Cox is Professor of English at the University at Texas at Austin and the author of, most recently, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Alexander Pettit is Professor of English at the University of North Texas and has published widely on modern drama and eighteenth-century literature.

From the Back Cover

Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays bundles critically edited texts of three thematically allied plays with an extensive primary, secondary, and textual apparatus. The Cherokee Night (1932), comprising seven asynchronous scenes set between 1895 and 1931, is Riggs’s most experimental play. Its Cherokee characters inhabit a history of dispossession and violence, including the dissolution of the Cherokee Nation with Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Their daily survival constitutes the apex of resistance. Not so for the Indigenes of The Year of Pilar (1938), the most radical American Indian text prior to the Native American renaissance that began in the late 1960s. Here, Yucatecan Mayans take a government program of land reform as an opportunity to reclaim their homeland and punish settler-colonialists for centuries of enslavement, torture, and sexual violence. Riggs returns to Indian Territory in The Cream in the Well (1941), set on the eve of Oklahoma statehood. The Cherokee Sawters family responds to the onset of statehood by lamenting lost opportunities and fretting about an uncertain future.

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1554815916
• ISBN 13: 9781554815913
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Cox James H., Pettit Alexander