Rhetorical Strategies in Thomson Highway’s Henry Kreisel Lecture
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2018 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | In 2014, Thomson Highway, the prominent Cree writer and artist, delivered his lecture-performance in the Henry Kreisel lecture series, organized annually by the University of Alberta’s Canadian Literature Centre since 2007 in order to showcase diverse voices of contemporary Canadian writers and artists. Titled A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (published in 2015 by the University of Alberta Press), his talk was one of three in the series presented by Indigenous writers: similarly to Joseph Boyden and Eden Robinson, Highway used the opportunity to engage cross-cultural audiences by addressing a variety of issues related to contemporary Indigeneity. In the highly unruly multimodal and multilingual performance, Highway interpellates and confronts his audience through his characteristic humor as well as sharp critique, exposing the ultimate paradox of the cultural superiority of his ancestors on the one hand, and the ongoing precarity of contemporary Indigenous lives, particularly those of missing and murdered Indigenous women, on the other. My analysis of Highway’s performance will be contextualized within the established tradition of Indigenous intellectual thought prevalent in Indigenous nonfiction and will demonstrate the ways in which Highway’s rhetorical strategies both accommodate and unsettle his audience in a very playful manner which sheds light on Indigenous narrative efforts to communicate the fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival, efforts which may be perceived as helping us understand and appreciate Indigenous discourse from a transnational perspective. |
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