Migratory Subjectivity in E. Jane Gay’s Choup-nit-ki, With the Nez Percés

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6188215
AutoresWendy Harding (autor de correspondencia)
Año2015
Volumen10
Número2
Fecha de publicación2015-08-14
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEuropean Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336
EditorialOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/ejas.11038
OpenAlexW1949226758
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas18

Due to its unusual publishing history, E. Jane Gay’s Choup-nit-ki: With the Nez Percés has not received the critical attention it deserves. Through the book’s photographs and text, Gay stages a migratory, polyvocal narrator who rejects the unitary identity that establishes both the writer’s and the colonizer’s authority. This article studies textual features such as shifting focalization, the splitting of the writing subject into multiple personae, and the humor extracted from social contradictions to show how Gay’s book both cites and challenges nineteenth century conventions governing genre and gender. Contemporary theory (Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Butler) provides concepts that can aid our appreciation of the text’s originality. Gay’s self-presentation cracks the restrictive nineteenth century mold of femininity and liberates the subject, even as, ironically, the author collaborates in the project of imposing on the Nez Perce the constraints legislated through the Dawes Act. Gay’s book illustrates the author’s ambivalence about the Allotment policy that attempted to end tribal organization on the Nez Perce reservation

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Epistemology · Focalization · Foregrounding · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Originality · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · American Environmental and Regional History · American Literature and Culture · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Psychology

Herramientas

Abrir DOIOpen Access