NEEDLEWORK AS POLITICAL AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVEL

Handcrafts like quilting, knitting, sewing, and cross-stitching have traditionally been viewed as a “woman’s thing,” a gendered leisure time activity. However, women’s handcrafts when read as texts can yield multi-layered narratives. With the coming of the second wave feminism in the US in the 1960s, many feminist scholars, critiques turned to study literary texts in which women’s handcrafts yielded political and/or cultural meanings. In fact, there is a bulk of scholarly literature on the representations of needlework in American literary tradition. The aim of this research paper is not to offer a comprehensive study on the representations of women’s handcrafts in American literary tradition but to bring attention to three contemporary American novels, Mama Day by African American feminist author Gloria Naylor, Four Souls by Native American Louise Erdrich, and Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. the study of which, I believe, will bring a new breath to the already existing scholarship on the topic.

Environmental Performativity in Native American and Afro-American Womens Fiction: An Ecofeminist Critique of Erdrichs Tracks and Morrisons Beloved

This article, evaluating the usefulness and applicability of the ecofeminist tenets upon the environmental fiction of Erdrich and Morrison, creates a new understanding of the preservation of the environment for engendering a more egalitarian relationship between humanity and nature. It presents the critique of the ways Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich engage with the environmental themes and motifs using the historical connections of their communities with nature as a reference point via eco-performative texts. The overall scheme of the article, therefore, denies the anthropocentric approach upheld by the Euro-American world towards the environment and glorifies the biocentric approach revered and celebrated by the Native American and AfroAmerican lifestyle, emphasizing that in the cosmic scheme of nature, not just humans but non-humans, nature and environment are equal partners. The study concludes that Morrison and Erdrich have stressed in their fiction the ecocritical recognition of the inevitable interdependence of man and nature. Their fiction asserts that considering environmental issues to be human issues can positively affect the human attitude towards nature/environment.

Native American Woman's Phenomenological Experience of Space and Place in Erdrich's Tracks

This study discusses Native American woman's experience of existential outsideness, which is caused by the Euro-American legislative act as represented by Louise Erdrich in her novel Tracks. This research analyzes the role of the Dawes Act of 1887 in triggering the experience of existential outsideness among the Native Americans in general and Native American women in particular. Through Edward Casey Ralph's phenomenological perspective on the notion of spatiality, the study reinterprets the representation of space and place in Louise Erdrich's Tracks. The study offers a spatial reading of a Native American woman's life to explicate how she confronts the issues related to the confiscation of her ancestral lands that trigger her experience of existential outsideness to her land. The study concludes that Euro-American policies of acculturation and assimilation thwarted spatioexistential experiences of Native American women.

Exploring the Interconnection between Native American Land/Environment and Women

This article explores the relationship between Native American lands/environment and the women from ecocritical /ecofeminist perspectives. It has been postulated that while the Euro- American accounts of the history, culture, indigenous women and their relation with nature/land project stereotypical, negative images, Louise Erdrich, through the employment of hybrid narrative techniques combining Eurocentric and Native American modes of narration, has reconfigured the Native American women's environmental identity/subjectivity. This study conducts discourse analysis of the two richly thematic environmental narratives of Louise Erdrich to establish the interconnectivity between women and lands within the realm of ecofeminism. The primary texts explored include Tracks and Love Medicine. The study's contribution is it's highlighting the significance of the Native American Ecofeminist narratives that consider environmental issues to be human issues and thus positively affect the human attitude towards nature.

Grieving Places, Sovereign Places: Storied Space in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House

Przestrzenie żałoby, przestrzenie autonomii: przestrzeń opowieści w The Round House Louise Erdrich Artykuł jest przyczynkiem do debaty na temat odrodzenia rdzennych Amerykanów w kontekście kolonialnego wywłaszczenia i wykorzenienia. Jest odpowiedzią na potrzebę wyjścia poza uproszczone reprezentacje rdzennych Amerykanów i ich ziemi. Sposobem na to może być uznanie powiązania pomiędzy tożsamością rozumianą jako bycie-w-ziemi a zakorzenioną normatywnością. Artykuł analizuje powieść The Round House (2012) autorstwa Louise Erdrich z plemienia Anishinaabe, koncentrując się na symbolice, opisach i tematyce powiązanych z ponownym opowiadaniem tożsamości i ziemi rdzennych Amerykanów. Te elementy czynią z powieści dekolonizujący palimpsest złożony z odrębnych, lecz misternie powiązanych warstw. Esej dowodzi, że powieść Erdrich za pomocą słów kreśli nową mapę Ameryki, na której jej rdzenni mieszkańcy odzyskują swą podmiotowość i prawo do żalu. Ponadto The Round House zauważa złożone powiązania pomiędzy rdzennymi Amerykanami a stylem życia kolonialnych najeźdźców i redefiniuje pojęcie suwerenności.

“Where Butchers Sing Like Angels,” Of Captive Bodies and Colonized Minds (With a Little Help from Louise Erdrich)

The Master Butchers Signing Club – Louise Erdrich’s “countehistory” (Natalie Eppelsheimer) of the declared and undeclared wars of Western patriarchy–depicts a world where butchering, when done with precision and expertise, approximates art. Fidelis Waldvogel, whose name means literally Faithful Forestbird, is a sensitive German boy turned the first-rate sniper in the First World War and master butcher in his adult life in America. When Fidelis revisits his homeland after the slaughter of World War II, Delphine, his second wife, has a vision of smoke and ashes bursting out of the mouths of the master butchers singing onstage in a masterful harmony of voices. Why it is only Delphine, an outsider in the Western world, that can see the crematorium-like reality overimposed on the bucolic scenery of a small German town? Drawing on decolonial and Critical Animal Studies, this article tries to demystify some of the norms and normativities we live by.

“Unblowing, Ungrowing Are the Roses There”

This chapter brings Virginia Woolf and Native American writer Louise Erdrich into transnational conversation to highlight intersections between sexual violence against women and manipulation and destruction of the land. It situates both novels in the context of ecofeminism. A “common goal of ecofeminism,” Kathi Wilson states, ‘is to disrupt those women-nature connections that are oppressive’. Such disruption figures significantly in Between the Acts and The Round House, earthtexts depicting the suffering of Others to reveal how hegemonic concepts of land use and ownership engender the violation of women.

Against Sustainability

Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with. Alongside the chapters that focus on defamiliarization and critique are chapters that reveal that the nineteenth century also gave rise to more unusual and provisional environmentalisms. These chapters offer alternatives to the failed paradigms of recycling and preservation, exploring Henry David Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s joyful, anti-consumerist frugality and Hannah Crafts’s and Harriet Wilson’s radical pet keeping model of living with others. The coda considers zero waste and then contrasts sustainability with functional utopianism, an alternative orienting paradigm that might more reliably guide mainstream U.S. environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Ultimately, Against Sustainability offers novel readings of familiar literary works that demonstrate how U.S. nineteenth-century literature compels us to rethink our understandings of the past in order to imagine other, more just and environmentally-sound futures.