Indigenous modernism: dehabituating reading practices

Madeleine Reddon

doi:10.33776/candb.v8i1.3604

Madeleine Reddon University of British Columbia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4408-5451

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33776/candb.v8i1.3604

Keywords:

decolonial methodologies, indigenous studies, cultural studies, global avantgardes

Abstract

This paper experiments with formal style as a way of working through the literary discipline’s lacunae regarding aesthetic value, race, and coloniality. Using a “counter taxonomy” as an example of academic dissent, this paper considers the limits of this form of dissenting speech within “public discourse” (Fraser; Habermas) by demonstrating a persistent occlusion in the literary discipline related to this mode of speech, which concerns the “primitive” subject. I define a term to unsettle a series of categorical terms long-held as guiding frameworks in our discipline: modernism, Native and Harlem renaissances, etc. This term is “Indigenous modernism,” a category that is a contradiction in terms because it announces its inclusion of the original term’s constitutive exclusion, ie. the primitive within the modern, through the language producing its erasure. Through this experiment, I argue for the necessity of a different kind of dissent, specifically a more capacious form of literary critique that interrogates the problems of holding a discourse in common and the specific needs of anti-colonial work. As a pedagogical exercise that models the benefits of failure, I suggest that this intervention requires us to think about how we represent truth through critique.

Author Biography

Madeleine Reddon, University of British Columbia

Metis from Treaty Six Territory, PhD Candidate in the Department for English Language and Literatures

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