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Blood Narrative is a comparative literary and cultural study of post-World War II literary and activist texts by New Zealand Maori and American Indians-groups who share much in their responses to European settler colonialism. Chadwick Allen reveals the complex narrative tactics employed by writers and activists in these societies that enabled them to realize unprecedented practical power in making both their voices and their own sense of indigeneity heard.
Allen shows how both Maori and Native Americans resisted the assimilationist tide rising out of World War II and how, in the 1960s and 1970s, they each experienced a renaissance of political and cultural activism and literary production that culminated in the formation of the first general assembly of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. He focuses his comparison on two fronts: first, the blood/land/memory complex that refers to these groups' struggles to define indigeneity and to be freed from the definitions of authenticity imposed by dominant settler cultures. Allen's second focus is on the discourse of treaties between American Indians and the U.S. government and between Maori and Great Britain, which he contends offers strong legal and moral bases from which these indigenous minorities can argue land and resource rights as well as cultural and identity politics.
With its implicit critique of multiculturalism and of postcolonial studies that have tended to neglect the colonized status of indigenous First World minorities, Blood Narrative will appeal to students and scholars of literature, American and European history, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and comparative cultural studies.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Marking the Indigenous in Indigenous Minority Texts
Part I. A Directed Self-Determination
1. A Marae on Paper: Writing a New Maori World in
Te Ao Hou 2. Indian Truth: Debating Indigenous Identity after
Indians in the War Part II. An Indigenous Renaissance
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3. Rebuilding the Ancestor: Constructing Self and Community in the Maori Renaissance
4. Blood/Land/Memory: Narrating Indigenous Identity in the American Indian Renaissance
Conclusion: Declaring a Fourth World
Appendix: Integrated Time Line, World War II to 1980
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Chadwick Allen is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University and Associate Editor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.
