Authors:Alison Turner Pages: 1 - 26 Abstract: Stephen Graham Jones’ Ledfeather (2008), a semi-epistolary, semi-historical novel, poses questions about how historical knowledge is made and what to do with it. While scholars have studied the novel’s postmodern attributes as methods for subversive critiques of historiography in indigenous colonial contexts, as of yet no study prioritizes the novel’s use of photographs toward these aims. After situating the novel’s engagement with photographs into histories of photography and indigenous colonization, I examine the rhetorical role of these photos in the complex Ledfeather narrative. Guided by Gerald Vizenor’s framing of “the indian [as] poselocked in portraiture” (Fugitive Poses 146), I argue that the photos enact Vizenor’s sense of transmotion, or “the tease of creation in pictures, memories, and stories” (Fugitive Poses 173). I end by considering the rhetorical relationships between images and words both in archival collections that are specific to these histories and in Ledfeather as postmodern historical fiction. PubDate: 2023-01-27 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1090 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Zachary Perdieu Pages: 27 - 61 Abstract: This article explores how Stephen Graham Jones adapts the epistolary form in his novel Ledfeather to create a new textual space capable of depicting nonlinear, spatialized time. Jones’s evolution of the epistolary mode creates a two-way temporal bridge within his narrative where past, present, and future can interact. This experimentation with the epistolary form acts as a rumination on the limits of a western, linear understanding of time when coping with historical and ancestral trauma. His subsequent deconstruction of the epistolary form then mirrors the collapse of the novel’s two independent timelines as they conflate to become a single, interactive and cohabitated temporality that spans generations. As the novel progresses, the barriers between the two primary narrative timelines of Doby Saxon and Indian Agent Francis Dalimpere began to wane, and this fracturing of time is mirrored by each narratives’ respective forms slowly collapsing, as well, until the Dalimpere sections become less epistolary, and Saxon’s sections increasingly take on formulaic standards of the epistolary mode. By collapsing the two timelines and merging the respective forms of each section, Jones introduces a new hybridized textual space which speaks to a nonlinear conception of temporality, giving space primacy over time in mapping history, memory, and narrative. PubDate: 2023-01-27 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1076 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:John Gamber Pages: 62 - 94 Abstract: This essay places the lyconthropic representations in Stephen Graham Jones’ (Blackfeet) Mongrels (2016) in conversation with those (and the more broadly lupine) in Brandon Hobson’s (Cherokee) novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018). Both novels wield their lupine imagery (of werewolves and wolves) as devices to interrogate the tensions and overlaps between a series of dichotomies triangulated through their respective constructions of masculinity, notably: the (masculine) wild and the (feminine) domestic; solitude and community; and motion and stasis. Ultimately, WDST puts forth a protagonist who is more ambivalent to the (feminized) domestic sphere and who cultivates various feminine elements of himself, while generally opting out of the social elements of community. Mongrels, however, offers a protagonist who initially denies his responsibilities to community, which he sees as antithetical to the masculine wolf he longs to be, and, rather, akin to the feminine human he maligns. PubDate: 2023-01-27 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1085 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Zachary Laminack Pages: 95 - 125 Abstract: Distanced from kin, land, and stories that might otherwise orient the narrator’s reconstruction of his adolescence, Stephen Graham Jones's Mapping the Interior (2017) offers the mindscape of Junior, who readers encounter as a twelve year-old boy sleepwalking his way toward becoming the absence his father before him eventually became, but who nevertheless feels what inhabits him “squirming” within (12). Through this sleepwalking existence, coupled with the narrator’s father’s appearance-in-death as what was impossible for him in life, Jones indexes the conditions within which becoming “Indian” in the context of settler colonialism is akin to becoming dead, “tethered” to a “cyclical” story of emergence, removal, internalization, and repetition that Jones articulates viscerally through chrysalides and metamorphosis. Imagined through a narrative of perpetual paternal absence, Jones’s emphasis on life cycles conveys his critique of settler chronobiopolitics, or the governance of life through the governance of time. When what there is to inherit appears as a tradition of assimilation-as-death and death-as-sleepwalking, Jones suggests, one knows the life cycle already (106). The cynical detachment of Jones's narrator, though, is a vehicle through which Mapping reimagines the enduring effects of dispossession and the affective violence of erasure as occluding but not eliminating the coherence and endurance of peoplehood. In the afterword to Mongrels (2016), Jones writes "if you wrap yourself in the right story, everything makes sense" (7). Throughout Mapping, Jones wraps Junior in what might be called a Blackfeet surround of place and story, an alternative background against which readers might begin to reimagine the life cycle to which Junior appears tethered. In this essay, I read Mapping's contrasting backgrounds as producing a critique of discussions of Native masculinity that link resistance to becoming something that lies in one's blood, pointing instead toward the fact that recognizing what it is one might become depends on the stories and memories to which one has access. Mapping the Interior calls for different stories than those in which Native men appear already marked for death. Jones suggests that these different stories are not found in “tradition,” nor in “blood,” but in the way the water in a kitchen sink might lead to the “shallows of a lake that goes on forever” (103). PubDate: 2023-01-27 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1080 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Nicole R. Rikard Pages: 126 - 150 Abstract: An exciting movement in literature (as well as art, music, gaming, and other forms of media) that is presently exploding throughout our media streams in the twenty-first century is that of Indigenous futurism. This concept, which owes its namesake to scholar Grace L. Dillon and her work Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), seeks to explore the possibilities of alternate pasts, presents, and futures, offering a fresh perspective on the beauty, power, and resilience of Indigeneity. One writer delving into this movement is Stephen Graham Jones, prolific author of many novels and short stories including his most recent works The Babysitter Lives (2022), The Backbone of the World (2022), “Attack of the 50 Foot Indian” (2021), “How to Break into a Hotel Room” (2021), My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021), “Wait for the Night” (2020), Night of the Mannequins (2020), and “The Guy with the Name” (2020), and The Only Good Indians (2020). Although Jones’s contributions to the literary world are extensive, there has been relatively little scholarship dedicated to his continuous experimenting in varying genres, forms, and subject matters. Likewise, scholarship on Indigenous futurism is also quite scarce, especially as it is developed through the literary genre of horror fiction. This work extends both scholarly conversations by analyzing Jones’s The Only Good Indians as a work of Indigenous futurism, specifically as it relates to rewriting the past, present, and future through various methods of Native slipstream. Fictional newspaper headlines and articles, a concentrated insistence on rationalization coupled with the inability to achieve such measures, and varying points of view combine to create a novel that is a hauntingly beautiful depiction of resiliency and possibility for an alternative future in which Indigenous worldviews replace the damaging cycles created and perpetuated by Western ideologies—positioning The Only Good Indians as an exceptional contribution to the field of Indigenous futurism, in addition to substantiating that both horror and futuristic fiction can serve as an effective medium of decolonization. Keywords: Indigenous futurism, decolonization, horror, Stephen Graham Jones, speculative fiction PubDate: 2023-01-27 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1088 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Billy J. Stratton Pages: 151 - 163 Abstract: An interview/conversation between Stephen Graham Jones and Billy J. Stratton, which took place in Denver on October 24, 2022. PubDate: 2023-01-29 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1140 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Gage Karahkwiio Diabo Pages: 164 - 171 Abstract: This review essay considers Stephen Graham Jones' Night of the Mannequins, editor Neil Christopher's Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories, and Shane Hawk's Anoka. PubDate: 2023-01-29 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1073 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Denise Low Pages: 186 - 188 Abstract: This review looks at Indigenous futurisms inherent in this slipstream novel by a Filipina author. The Indigenous value of "kapwa" informs the structure and content of this experiemental narrative work that includes embedded poetry, literary theory, history, political history and theory, and more. The author suggests how an alternative view of time allows for integration and synthesis rather than fragmentation. PubDate: 2023-01-29 DOI: 10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.1027 Issue No:Vol. 8, No. 2 (2023)
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