Review by Choice Review
Asserting that regional, national, and international discourses and ideologies created and constrained Southern Renaissance representations of "Indian-ness," Trefzer (Univ. of Mississippi) argues that Andrew Lytle, Caroline Gordon, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty were spurred by archaeological discoveries of Native artifacts and by anxieties about modern life to use "the Indian signifier" to critique American nationalism, expansionism, and materialism. For example, Lytle's novels of the Spanish conquest interrogate the imperial colonialism; Gordon dramatizes the gendered and racially charged anxieties that haunt the creation of the pure, white, male national body, anxieties potent in the segregated South. Faulkner may deconstruct the binaries of savagery and civilization, of colonizer and colonized, but he (and the rest of these writers) can never reimagine "the Indian" outside the hegemonic discourses to which they remain committed. Thus, according to Trefzer, Indians are reinscribed as objects of mourning and nostalgia, absent in modern life except as representatives of a desired communitarian ethos or as indigenous markers appropriated to create American identity. Welty largely escapes such duplicity because she is less engaged in representing Indians than in deploying parody and pastiche to challenge conventional epistemologies, to demonstrate the "difficulty of telling the truth about historical events." Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. M. L. Robertson Sweet Briar College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
