Melanie Benson Taylor – författare

In Reconstructing the Native South, Melanie Benson Taylor examines the diverse body of Native American literature in the contemporary U.S. South—literature written by the descendants of tribes who evaded Removal and have maintained ties with their southeastern homelands. In so doing Taylor advances a provocative, even counterintuitive claim: that the U.S. South and its Native American survivors have far more in common than mere geographical proximity. Both cultures have long been haunted by separate histories of loss and nostalgia, Taylor contends, and the moments when those experiences converge in explicit and startling ways have yet to be investigated by scholars. These convergences often bear the scars of protracted colonial antagonism, appropriation, and segregation, and they share preoccupations with land, sovereignty, tradition, dispossession, subjugation, purity, and violence.Taylor poses difficult questions in this work. In the aftermath of Removal and colonial devastation, what remains—for Native and non-Native southerners—to be recovered? Is it acceptable to identify an Indian “lost cause”? Is a deep sense of hybridity and intercultural affiliation the only coherent way forward, both for the New South and for its oldest inhabitants? And in these newly entangled, postcolonial environments, has global capitalism emerged as the new enemy for the twenty-first century? Reconstructing the Native South is a compellingly original work that contributes to conversations in Native American, southern, and transnational American studies.

In Reconstructing the Native South, Melanie Benson Taylor examines the diverse body of Native American literature in the contemporary U.S. South—literature written by the descendants of tribes who evaded Removal and have maintained ties with their southeastern homelands. In so doing Taylor advances a provocative, even counterintuitive claim: that the U.S. South and its Native American survivors have far more in common than mere geographical proximity. Both cultures have long been haunted by separate histories of loss and nostalgia, Taylor contends, and the moments when those experiences converge in explicit and startling ways have yet to be investigated by scholars. These convergences often bear the scars of protracted colonial antagonism, appropriation, and segregation, and they share preoccupations with land, sovereignty, tradition, dispossession, subjugation, purity, and violence.Taylor poses difficult questions in this work. In the aftermath of Removal and colonial devastation, what remains—for Native and non-Native southerners—to be recovered? Is it acceptable to identify an Indian “lost cause”? Is a deep sense of hybridity and intercultural affiliation the only coherent way forward, both for the New South and for its oldest inhabitants? And in these newly entangled, postcolonial environments, has global capitalism emerged as the new enemy for the twenty-first century? Reconstructing the Native South is a compellingly original work that contributes to conversations in Native American, southern, and transnational American studies.

How do we read southern literature in a postplantation, postregional, and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibility––both for apocalypse and for deliverance––in contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality?Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity’s detention within what Timothy Morton calls the “weird” web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies.As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the “weird” is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objects—neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control.

How do we read southern literature in a postplantation, postregional, and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibility––both for apocalypse and for deliverance––in contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality?Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity’s detention within what Timothy Morton calls the “weird” web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies.As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the “weird” is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objects—neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control.

Native American literature has always been uniquely embattled. It is marked by divergent opinions about what constitutes authenticity, sovereignty, and even literature.  It announces a culture beset by paradox: simultaneously primordial and postmodern; oral and inscribed; outmoded and novel. Its texts are a site of political struggle, shifting to meet external and internal expectations. This Cambridge History endeavors to capture and question the contested character of Indigenous texts and the way they are evaluated. It delineates significant periods of literary and cultural development in four sections: "Traces & Removals" (pre-1870s); "Assimilation and Modernity" (1879-1967); "Native American Renaissance" (post-1960s); and "Visions & Revisions" (21st century). These rubrics highlight how Native literatures have evolved alongside major transitions in federal policy toward the Indian, and via contact with broader cultural phenomena such, as the American Civil Rights movement. There is a balance between a history of canonical authors and traditions, introducing less-studied works and themes, and foregrounding critical discussions, approaches, and controversies.

Indians are everywhere and nowhere in the US South. Cloaked by a rhetoric of disappearance after Indian Removal, actual southeastern tribal groups are largely invisible but immortalized in regional mythologies, genealogical lore, romanticized stereotypes, and unpronounceable place names. These imaginary 'Indians' compose an ideological fiction inextricable from that of the South itself. Often framed as hindrances to the Cotton Kingdom, Indians were in fact active participants in the plantation economy and chattel slavery before and after Removal. Dialectical tropes of Indigeneity linger in the white southern imagination in order to both conceal and expose the tangle of land, labor, and race as formative, disruptive categories of being and meaning. This book is not, finally, about the recovery of the region's lost Indians, but a reckoning with their inaccessible traces, ambivalent functions, and the shattering implications of their repressed significance for modern southern identity.

"The organizing principle for this anthology is the common Native American heritage of its authors; and yet that thread proves to be the most tenuous of all, as the experience of indigeneity differs radically for each of them. While many experience a centripetal pull toward a cohesive Indian experience, the indications throughout these essays lean toward a richer, more illustrative panorama of difference. What tends to bind them together are not cultural practices or spiritual attitudes per se, but rather circumstances that have no exclusive province in Indian country: that is, first and foremost, poverty, and its attendant symptoms of violence, substance abuse, and both physical and mental illness.... Education plays a critical role in such lives: many of the authors recall adoring school as young people, as it constituted a place of escape and a rare opportunity to thrive.... While many of the writers do return to their tribal communities after graduation, ideas about 'home' become more malleable and complicated."—from the IntroductionI Am Where I Come From presents the autobiographies of thirteen Native American undergraduates and graduates of Dartmouth College, ten of them current and recent students. Twenty years ago, Cornell University Press published First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, also about the experiences of Native American students at Dartmouth College. I Am Where I Come From addresses similar themes and experiences, but it is very much a new book for a new generation of college students.Three of the essays from the earlier book are gathered into a section titled "Continuing Education," each followed by a shorter reflection from the author on his or her experience since writing the original essay. All three have changed jobs multiple times, returned to school for advanced degrees, started and increased their families, and, along the way, continuously revised and refined what it means to be Indian.The autobiographies contained in I Am Where I Come From explore issues of native identity, adjustment to the college environment, cultural and familial influences, and academic and career aspirations. The memoirs are notable for their eloquence and bravery.