A Balancing Act : Rhetorical Strategies and Cultural Precarity in Indigenous Non-fiction
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Three prominent Indigenous fiction writers were recently invited to present a talk in the Henry Kreisel lecture series organized by the University of Alberta: namely, they were Joseph Boyden in 2007, Eden Robinson in 2010 and Thomson Highway in 2014. Each of them opted for a different rhetorical strategy to engage cross-cultural audiences and address a variety of issues related to contemporary Indigeneity: Boyden tells a personal story of inhabiting two different cultural spaces to demonstrate transnational aspects of First Nations existence; Robinson combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to Haisla cultural survival; while Highway presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to demonstrate cultural superiority of his ancestors. My analysis of the three talks will be contextualized within the established tradition of Indigenous nonfiction and the ways in which Judith Butler’s theoretical notion of precarity, understood as unequally distributed vulnerability imposed on the disempowered, can help us understand Indigenous strategies of communicating the fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival. |
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