"Resilience and Healing in the Non-fiction of Indigenous Public Intellectuals"
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2017 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | The presentation will focus on exploring how the notions of resilience and healing are conveyed through the genre of personal non-fiction by contemporary Indigenous writers who apart from writing fiction often speak/write as public intellectuals, addressing issues pertinent to their respective Indigenous communities and to themselves as Indigenous artists in a globalized world. While the genre of non-fiction may have been slightly neglected in the critical scholarship, it has, as Robert Warrior claims in People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction, always played a central role in constituting Indigenous intellectual milieu. It stems, however, from a specific tradition—one that is informed by Indigenous cultural practices of storytelling, lived experience, communal identity as well as the transgenerational trauma of colonization. Indigenous non-fiction has also been used as a vehicle to theorize philosophical concepts, critical knowledges and research methodologies, although often through personalized stories and extended family and ancestors’ experience rather than abstract theories. Resilience of the First Nations cultures is in these narratives articulated through the principle of duality: on the one hand they tell stories of grief, loss and displacement but, on the other hand, of survival, continuance and sustainability. I will use examples from earlier personal non-fiction by Indigenous women such as Lee Maracle and Beth Brant, who in their non-fiction present arguments for restoring healthy, functioning and strong female Indigeneity in order to decolonize Indigenous communities, while also drawing attention to the ways in which other established First Nations writers present Indigenous worldviews, namely in the Henry Kreisel lecture series which recently featured Indigenous writers Joseph Boyden (2007), Eden Robinson (2010), and, most recently, Thomson Highway (2014). I will argue that these writers and storytellers speak as public intellectuals, using personal non-fiction and autobiographical writing to address various audiences and to testify to the resilience of cultures that survived genocide and dispossession. |
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