Gerald Vizenor is the most important and widely published American Indian author of our time. Poet, essayist, novelist, journalist, teacher, committed activist and fierce critic of discriminatory American racial politics, he has devoted and continues to devote his life to studying, exploring and redefining the past and present history of Native Americans in what was once their homeland. A prolific author - with more than thirty published titles - and extraordinarily innovative, he has received numerous awards and accolades. The feature that distinguishes his literary production is the unity of themes and motifs that run through it with a profoundly personal style that fuses prose, poetry and essay under a common denominator: that of a language where the boundaries between genres disappear and give way to a unique literature that could well be coined as Vizenorian. Literary Chance: Essays on Native American Survivance brings together fifteen essays in which the author delves into the way in which language has created the image of what the North American Indian is; a simulacrum that Vizenor tries to dismantle with a new vocabulary that reveals this invention and representation through simulation.
