CROSSING BORDERS, FINDING IDENTITIES

Session Coordinator: Richard Westphal
Dept. of English, Aurora University
Aurora, IL 60506
rwestpha@aurora.edu

The Southern Writer and Oppositional Identity

This paper will examine contemporary southern fiction as an expression of oppositional identity. Although theories of oppositional identity, as developed by John Ogbu, Chela Sondoval and others, generally address racial identity, regional identity can also be understood as an oppositional stance. The contradictory, fragmented nature of the oppositional identity is a central force in the works of two contemporary southern writers, Clyde Edgerton and Lewis Nordan. For both of these writers, the dynamic of oppositional identity works in two ways. First, they are both affected by the history of the south and oppositional stance of the southern literary tradition in response to northern centers of political, economic, and literary power. Second, both of these writers have also developed an oppositional identity within and against the southern literary tradition, and in each case, this identity has been influenced by cross-cultural experiences. For Edgerton, this oppositional identity developed, in part, as the result his experiences as a US Air Force pilot during the Vietnam conflict. For Nordan, the oppositional stance grows out of the geographic and cultural distance he has placed between himself and the south throughout his writing career.

Sara Elliott
Aurora University
selliott@aurora.edu

Reclaiming a Spiritual Legacy as form and theme in Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Business of Fancydancing

Among the majority of Native American cultures, evidence of third and even fourth genders materializes within studies of tribal practices, mythologies, religions and religious ceremonies (Roscoe, 7). There is further evidence, according to Roscoe, that these genders “enjoyed high social, economic and religious standing” within their tribes (133). Ironically, documentations of the whites’ encounters with indigenous people illustrate an inability to understand their spirituality and, consequently, an effort to erase what George Catlin, renowned painter and chronicler of the “vanishing” Indian way of life, described as “one of the most unaccountable and disgusting customs that [he had] ever met in Indian country” (Allen, 199). Whereas gender transformation was intrinsically tied to spiritual beliefs and practices among people who lived in harmony with the natural world, the European colonizers, whose values were shaped by their Judeo-Christian traditions, were interpreting this gender mixing as perverse, and immoral and using these religious interpretations to justify forced assimilation. Tribal literature originates within sacred ceremonies, where borders between the material and supernatural are indistinct. Ceremonies restore the psychic unity of the people; through sacred rituals creatures realize their power to transcend multiple aspects of their being. Those living in the third or fourth genders, (the changing ones) are perceived as mediators between these aspects and, therefore, often hold the position of shaman or ceremonial leader. This presentation explores the relationship between Native American spirituality and Sherman Alexie’s writings. Two collections, The Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven (a novel) and The Business of Fancydancing (a collection of stories and poems), work effectively in the classroom to take students inside a borderless world in which polarized conceptions of gender, reality, and spirituality as well as linear conceptions of narrative break down. Studying these novels provides a means through which students can connect to the long-lasting effects of forced assimilation, tribal efforts to reclaim their spiritual legacies and the Native Americans’ effort to redefine themselves in the modern world.

Kathleen Carroll
Aurora University
kcarroll@aurora.edu

“Not with Nothing But. With Nothing.":The Surrender of Selfhood in Coetzee’s Disgrace

This paper will explore the process by which the borders and boundaries between Afrikaners and Africans shift and ultimately disappear in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. With attention to cultural and political changes in post-apartheid South Africa, this presentation will explore the post-colonial European presence in the novel as it is confronted and overwhelmed by the newly liberated native African presence, all viewed through the perspective of the increasingly helpless protagonist David Lurie. While the novel portrays a clear image of the means by which the previously held dominance of the Afrikaner is supplanted by the newly empowered and previously oppressed, the novel charts as well the process by which the narrative point of view, most closely aligned with David, is destabilized and ultimately replaced by the voice of the next generation, his daughter Lucy, who, willingly or not, surrenders her assumed claim to assert her identity in the South African landscape.

Daniel Hipp
Aurora University
dhipp@aurora.edu

The Writer’s Journey in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival

Like all of Naipaul’s books, The Enigma of Arrival is the product of a journey across cultural borders, a journey from one of the more marginal outposts of a former empire to the once-imperial center. Much more than just a matter of exchanging one location and culture for another, Naipaul’s was also a journey toward a new identity, toward a vocation as a writer, and it is this inner journey and its unexpected—often enigmatic—consequences that The Enigma of Arrival represents with a teasingly appropriate mix of autobiographical candor and novelistic artifice. In ways large and small, the book advertises its origins in the life experience of its author, but it does not permit its reader to take it as unmixed autobiography. For in the course of his journey Naipaul discovered both that his vocation as a writer was a call to explore, rather than escape, his experience as a man (an exile, a permanent outsider) and that he had, along the way, become “one of [his] own characters.” The most metculous fidelity to fact has brought him to a recogntion of the inextricability of fact and fiction, and it is only through the pursuit of the writer’s vocation that the man’s experience can be faithfully recorded. Both experience and vocation, however unforseen their specific forms, are results of the decision to exchange one place and culture for another: the man lives, and the writer writes, in a world where roles and situations are caught up in a process of perpetual re-invention and where what appears to have been found is always found to have been made.

Richard Westphal
Aurora University
rwestpha@aurora.edu