Angela Benkhadda

Literary texts by Native American authors frequently engage with the genre of the anglophone historical novel to negotiate notions of history and time. Novels from John Joseph Mathews’ (Osage) Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White White Man’s Road (1932) to Anishinaabe writer Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman imaginatively reconstruct the Native past to counter the erasure of Indigenous perspectives on history, intervene in contemporaneous political, legal, and cultural discourses, and envision Native futurities. This dissertation contributes to Native and Indigenous Studies as well as to scholarship on the historical novel by providing a systematic analysis of these writings as part of an emerging generic tradition. To do so, it focuses on two main questions: The first question is concerned with the navigation of different generic and epistemological terrains – in particular the relationship of this genre with Indigenous oral traditions and conventions of the anglophone historical novel grounded in Euro-Western and settler-colonial conceptions of time and history. These epistemologies are reflected in the US-American notion of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and the trope of the ‘Vanishing Indian,’ which depict the extinction of Native Americans as inevitable and their continuing presence as anachronistic. The corpus of this dissertation centers on eight literary texts belonging to four distinct phases in Native-settler relations – from the 1930s and 1940s up to the 21st Century. The theoretical framework builds on Indigenous and Native American studies as well as postcolonial theory – with a particular focus on recent scholarship on temporalities. It also takes into account new developments in the study of the historical novel that seek to move away from normative genre definitions and create theoretical space for the research of marginalized perspectives on history. The combination of close readings with historical contextualizations illuminates how Native American historical fiction as an aesthetic tradition expands, adapts, and subverts conventions of the anglophone historical novel through literary strategies such as polyvocality, heteroglossia, and fragmentation to defamiliarize established settler-colonial historical narratives and create tribal historical imaginaries that address contemporaneous concerns. 

in: Birgit Däwes, Bethany Webster-Parmentier (Hrsg.): Indigenous North American Futurities in Literature, Media, and Museums.

in: Alina Hofmann, Paul Labelle (Hrsg.): Opake Medien. Metakommentar und Störung als medienübergreifende Verfahren, Hannover: Wehrhahn 2024, pp. 19-38.

in: COPAS – Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies 23/2 (2022), pp. 80–100.

in: izw3 Heft, 18.12.2024.