Indigenous Readings: Ethics, Politics, and Method in Indigenous Studies on Turtle Island and Beyond

Authors

  • Angela Maria Benkhadda Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.363

Keywords:

Native American Literatures, Indigenous Literatures, Positionality, Relationality, Ethics

Abstract

Reading has been at the center of ongoing debates among scholars of Native American, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit literatures for decades. In the context of these debates, my paper seeks to address the difficulties and challenges of reading Indigenous literatures from the standpoint of emerging non-Indigenous scholars educated in a Euro-American framework. For this purpose, the paper provides a toolbox of questions and strategies—organized around the five broad and interrelated topics of positionality, relationality, ethics, context, and incomplete readings—that can help students and early-career scholars to critically question their reading practices. To this end, my paper synthesizes a variety of scholarly perspectives on politics, ethics, and methods in Indigenous studies and applies the resulting framework to Leslie Marmon Silko’s opening of her novel Ceremony “(1977).

Author Biography

Angela Maria Benkhadda, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

Angela Benkhadda is a PhD student at the University of Bonn and a research assistant at the DFG Research Training Group 2291 Contemporary/Literature. She earned her B.A. in “English Studies” and “Languages and Cultures of the Islamic World” from the University of Cologne (2016) and her M.A. in “North American Studies” from the University of Bonn (2019) with a thesis on gender and genre in the Canadian short story cycle. Her PhD project explores the negotiation of conflicting epistemologies in Native American historical fiction and the role of contemporary political discourses in the representation of the past. Her research interests include Native American literature, postcolonial studies, decolonization, and feminist theory

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Published

2023-04-17

How to Cite

Benkhadda, Angela Maria. “Indigenous Readings: Ethics, Politics, and Method in Indigenous Studies on Turtle Island and Beyond”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, Apr. 2023, pp. 80-100, doi:10.5283/copas.363.