Between Two Emancipations

Louise Erdrich and the Politics of Disavowal

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11638611
AutoresMatthew Scully (0000-0002-0490-2250, University of Lausanne, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen50
Número1
Páginas141-164
Fecha de publicación2025-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlaf010
OpenAlexW4409902943
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas21

Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020) recounts a fictionalized history of the Turtle Mountain Reservation’s fight against the US government’s attempt in the early 1950s to “emancipate” the tribe by terminating its tribal status. I begin my discussion, however, with the debate about the politics of Erdrich’s aesthetics inaugurated by Leslie Marmon Silko’s critique of The Beet Queen (1986). Because of its explicitly political context, The Night Watchman offers an ideal occasion to revisit these questions about the relation between politics and aesthetics in Erdrich’s fiction. Drawing on American studies and Indigenous studies, I show that the novel foregrounds disavowal as the dominant structure by which the US settler state works simultaneously to acknowledge and deny Indigenous rights and sovereignty, a structure exemplified by the policies of the termination era (1940s-60s). Erdrich’s novel challenges anti-Indigenous violence by staging different possibilities of emancipation. While the central narrative privileges a politics of recognition, in which the settler state continues to recognize the sovereign status of the Turtle Mountain Reservation, the novel represents other forms of political engagement. One occurs through a brief allusion to Lolita Lebrón and Puerto Rican nationalism and their strategy of revolutionary counterviolence. The novel becomes further complicated, however, in its persistent yet elliptical allusions to Blackness and Black history. I conclude the article with a series of open provocations that question the limits of Erdrich’s political aesthetic in terms of its capacity to imagine forms of solidarity across racial and ethnic differences

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · History · Law