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"The 'savage' speaks, gains voice, and articulates resistance to the forces of oppression in Aldama's "Disrupting Savagism." It is relentless in its rigor and perspicacious in its investigation as it dismantles the social discourses that ascribe Native Americans and mixed bloods 'savage.' Aldama's efforts allow the Mestizo and Native American to take hold of the apparatus of representation and affirm self-identity. "Disrupting Savagism" is an important work, long needed to fill the gap in our collective understanding, a work that will have broad and long-lasting impact. I can think of no other work that addresses this material so capably and so thoroughly. An intelligent and powerful work."--Alfred Arteaga, author of "Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities"
List of contents
Acknowledgments
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Preface
Part I: Mapping Subalternity in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands
1. The Chiana/o and the Native American “Other” Talk Back: Theories of the Speaking Subject in a (Post?) Colonial Context
2. When the Mexicans Talk, Who Listens? The Crisis of Ethnography in Situating Early Voices from the U.S./Mexico Borderlands
Part II: Narrative Disruptions: Decolonization, Dangerous Bodies, and the Politics of Space
3. Counting Coup: Narrative Acts of (Re)Claiming Identity in
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
4. Toward a Hermeneutics of Decolonization: Reading Radical Subjectivities in
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua
5. A Border Coda: Dangerous Bodies, Liminality, and the Reclamation of Space in
Star Maps by Miguel Arteta
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Arturo J. Aldama
Summary
Colonial discourse in the United States has tended to criminalise, pathologise, and depict as savage not only Native Americans but Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples in Mexico, and Chicanas/os as well. This book reveals how each group, in turn, has actively attempted to create for itself a social and textual space.
