| Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern Contributor(s): Pfister, Joel (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822332922 ISBN-13: 9780822332923 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $28.45 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: February 2004 Annotation: "Joel Pfister's book shows how Indians served as subjects for quite specific American ideological projects, in this case, projects involving different conceptions of the 'individual.' Pfister's extensive archival research makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Richard Henry Pratt and the Carlisle Indian School and of John Collier and the Indian New Deal. He pays careful attention to such earlier Native writers and activists as Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin, Luther Standing Bear, and D'Arcy McNickle as well to contemporary Native writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Jimmie Durham, and Sherman Alexie, among several others. This is a wide-ranging and important book."--Arnold Krupat, Sarah Lawrence College ""Individuality Incorporated" is a real contribution to American cultural studies. Its reexaminations of the Carlisle School, John Collier, and the Taos bohemians produce a detailed picture of the uses of 'Indianizing.' The book is of real service to discussions of race, assimilation, and individualism in the twentieth century."--Tom Lutz, University of Iowa |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies |
| Dewey: 305.897 |
| LCCN: 2003016059 |
| Series: New Americanists |
| Physical Information: 0.85" H x 6.1" W x 9.24" (1.07 lbs) 340 pages |
| Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - Native American |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Spanning the 1870s to the present, Individuality Incorporated demonstrates how crucial a knowledge of Native American-White history is to rethinking key issues in American studies, cultural studies, and the history of subjectivity. Joel Pfister proposes an ingenious critical and historical reinterpretation of constructions of "Indians" and "individuals." Native Americans have long contemplated the irony that the government used its schools to coerce children from diverse tribes to view themselves first as "Indians"-encoded as the evolutionary problem-and then as "individuals"-defined as the civilized industrial solution. As Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, and Black Elk attest, tribal cultures had their own complex ways of imagining, enhancing, motivating, and performing the self that did not conform to federal blueprints labeled "individuality." Enlarging the scope of this history of "individuality," Pfister elaborates the implications of state, corporate, and aesthetic experiments that moved beyond the tactics of an older melting pot hegemony to impose a modern protomulticultural rule on Natives. The argument focuses on the famous Carlisle Indian School; assimilationist novels; Native literature and cultural critique from Zitkala-Sa to Leslie Marmon Silko; Taos and Santa Fe bohemians (Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Austin); multicultural modernisms (Fred Kabotie, Oliver La Farge, John Sloan, D'Arcy McNickle); the Southwestern tourism industry's development of corporate multiculturalism; the diversity management schemes that John Collier implemented as head of the Indian New Deal; and early formulations of ethnic studies. Pfister's unique analysis moves from Gilded Age incorporations of individuality to postmodern incorporations of multicultural reworkings of individuality to unpack what is at stake in producing subjectivity in World America. |