Heroes in Body Bags: Renegotiating Heroism in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning

Authors

  • Lorena Bickert Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.330

Keywords:

Anthropocene, Ecocriticism, Heroism, Indigenous Futurism, Ecological Other, Community

Abstract

This paper discusses how Maggie Hoskie, the Indigenous “hero”of Rebecca Roanhorse’s The Sixth World “series,renegotiates what it means to be a hero in the “post-Native Apocalypse”(Dillon 10). Trail of Lightning“,as a work that exploresIndigenous futurismsand ecofeminisms, demandsa renegotiation of Western hero ideals, highlighting how Maggie’s most heroic qualities arise from her challenge of stereotypical Western heroism in the wake of ecological disaster.

Author Biography

Lorena Bickert, Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg

Lorena Bickert is a Ph.D. candidate and contract lecturer at the University of Bamberg’s American Studies department. Her Ph.D. project is funded by the Cusanuswerk“ and focuses on representations of eco-heroism in contemporary North American literature. She has taught courses on nineteenth-century American women's poetry and “Eco-Heroines in American Literature and Culture” at the University of Bamberg. She holds a teaching degree in English and Spanish and completed her master's degree in English and American Studies at the University of Bamberg with a master's thesis on “The Power Structures in The Hunger Games“: Analyzing the Panoptic Spectacle and Counter-Spectacle.”

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Published

2020-10-26

How to Cite

Bickert, Lorena. “Heroes in Body Bags: Renegotiating Heroism in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, Oct. 2020, pp. 7-24, doi:10.5283/copas.330.

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 1 (2020)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.