Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective

This collectively authored volume celebrates a group of Native critics performing community in a lively, rigorous, sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges the aesthetics of individual literary representation.

Janice Acoose infuses a Cree reading of Canadian Cree literature with a creative turn to Cree language; Lisa Brooks looks at eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Native writers and discovers little-known networks among them; Tol Foster argues for a regional approach to Native studies that can include unlikely subjects such as Will Rogers; LeAnne Howe creates a fictional character, Embarrassed Grief, whose problematic authenticity opens up literary debates; Daniel Heath Justice takes on two prominent critics who see mixed-blood identities differently than he does in relation to kinship; Phillip Carroll Morgan uncovers written Choctaw literary criticism from the 1830s on the subject of oral performance; Kimberly Roppolo advocates an intertribal rhetoric that can form a linguistic foundation for criticism. Cheryl Suzack situates feminist theories within Native culture with an eye to applying them to subjugated groups across Indian Country; Christopher B. Teuton organizes Native literary criticism into three modes based on community awareness; Sean Teuton opens up new sites for literary performance inside prisons with Native inmates; Robert Warrior wants literary analysis to consider the challenges of eroticism; Craig S. Womack introduces the book by historicizing book-length Native-authored criticism published between 1986 and 1997, and he concludes the volume with an essay on theorizing experience.

Reasoning Together proposes nothing less than a paradigm shift in American Indian literary criticism, closing the gap between theory and activism by situating Native literature in real-life experiences and tribal histories. It is an accessible collection that will suit a wide range of courses—and will educate and energize anyone engaged in criticism of Native literature.

Phillip Carroll Morgan, senior staff writer at Chickasaw Press, holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in Native American literature from the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Chickasaw Renaissance and coauthor (with Judy Goforth Parker) of Dynamic Chickasaw Women, which won the Independent Publishers Book Awards’ Gold Medal for Mid-West Regional Non-fiction in 2012. Morgan also wrote The Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store, which won the Native Writers Circle of the Americas' First Book Award for Poetry in 2002, and he is a coauthor of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008.

Kimberly G. Wieser-Weryackwe is Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is one of the co-authors of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, the author of Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies, and the editor of American Indian Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students. 
 

Craig S. Womack is Associate Professor in the English Department at Emory University, author of Drowning in Fire: A Novel and Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, and coauthor of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective.