Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural ModernDuke University Press, 2004 M02 16 - 340 pages Spanning the 1870s to the present, Individuality Incorporated demonstrates how crucial a knowledge of Native American-White history is to rethinking key issues in American studies, cultural studies, and the history of subjectivity. Joel Pfister proposes an ingenious critical and historical reinterpretation of constructions of “Indians” and “individuals.” Native Americans have long contemplated the irony that the government used its schools to coerce children from diverse tribes to view themselves first as “Indians”—encoded as the evolutionary problem—and then as “individuals”—defined as the civilized industrial solution. As Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, and Black Elk attest, tribal cultures had their own complex ways of imagining, enhancing, motivating, and performing the self that did not conform to federal blueprints labeled “individuality.” Enlarging the scope of this history of “individuality,” Pfister elaborates the implications of state, corporate, and aesthetic experiments that moved beyond the tactics of an older melting pot hegemony to impose a modern protomulticultural rule on Natives. The argument focuses on the famous Carlisle Indian School; assimilationist novels; Native literature and cultural critique from Zitkala-Sa to Leslie Marmon Silko; Taos and Santa Fe bohemians (Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Austin); multicultural modernisms (Fred Kabotie, Oliver La Farge, John Sloan, D’Arcy McNickle); the Southwestern tourism industry’s development of corporate multiculturalism; the diversity management schemes that John Collier implemented as head of the Indian New Deal; and early formulations of ethnic studies. Pfister’s unique analysis moves from Gilded Age incorporations of individuality to postmodern incorporations of multicultural reworkings of individuality to unpack what is at stake in producing subjectivity in World America. |
From inside the book
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Page 14
... Euramerican relations . They draw on many rich archival materials that have been underused , thereby making it possible for me to present much original historical research and fresh critical readings of literary works in new historical ...
... Euramerican relations . They draw on many rich archival materials that have been underused , thereby making it possible for me to present much original historical research and fresh critical readings of literary works in new historical ...
Page 15
... Euramerican bohemian experience of dancing in deserts with Indians , and in many other circumstances . An emphasis on educational institutions alone would occlude one's larger vision of com- plex cultural changes taking place in the ...
... Euramerican bohemian experience of dancing in deserts with Indians , and in many other circumstances . An emphasis on educational institutions alone would occlude one's larger vision of com- plex cultural changes taking place in the ...
Page 16
... Euramerican ideas of individuality as that which Natives were compelled to suppress ( in reference to the potter Nampeyo ) : " I am not suggesting that Western individualism was the only ( or even a viable ) alternative for Nampeyo and ...
... Euramerican ideas of individuality as that which Natives were compelled to suppress ( in reference to the potter Nampeyo ) : " I am not suggesting that Western individualism was the only ( or even a viable ) alternative for Nampeyo and ...
Page 17
... Euramerican " individuals " who demonized these values as manifestations of communism or socialism . What Weaver terms " communitism " permeates many traditional Native notions of what constitutes survival , art , love , achievement ...
... Euramerican " individuals " who demonized these values as manifestations of communism or socialism . What Weaver terms " communitism " permeates many traditional Native notions of what constitutes survival , art , love , achievement ...
Page 18
... Euramerican peers and some of their institu- tion's expectations . At college they encountered competitive ... Europe and the United States , especially since the romantic era . " There was always some kind of artistic endeavor that ...
... Euramerican peers and some of their institu- tion's expectations . At college they encountered competitive ... Europe and the United States , especially since the romantic era . " There was always some kind of artistic endeavor that ...
Contents
Carlisle as Individualizing Factory Making Indians Individuals Workers | 31 |
Assimilation as Individualizing | 41 |
Treason to the Tribe | 48 |
Complexity Critical Thinking and Performance at Carlisle | 65 |
Class Race Warfare | 77 |
Carlisle Consumer Culture and Loaded Cultural Relativism 19041918 | 84 |
Education for What? | 92 |
Discourses of Native Cultural Subjectivity | 97 |
Indians in the Therapeutic and Modernist Marketplace | 151 |
Luhan Lawrence Austin and the Fantasy of Individualized Liberation in Tribal Scenes | 165 |
The Politics of Lawrences Psychological Critique of American Individualizing | 176 |
Radical Polemicist against Individualizing | 188 |
Collier as Social Theorist of Indians | 191 |
Reorganizing Indians | 198 |
La Forges and McNickles Fictions | 210 |
Taos Collier and the Multicultural Containment of Critique | 219 |
Faking Individual and Indian | 119 |
Multicultural Modernity Incorporated | 132 |
Garland and the Modernizing of Digestion Management | 141 |
Environmental Soulful and Literary Indians | 144 |
A Proposal to Reopen Carlisle | 256 |
Index | 320 |
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Common terms and phrases
American Indian American Indian Children Apache artists assimilation Beinecke Rare Book Black Elk Bonnin Bourne capitalist Carlisle Carlisle students Carlisle's century Charles Eastman civilization colonial Commissioner corporate critical critique D. H. Lawrence dancing Deloria and Lytle dian diversity economic Euramerican Farge girls Hampton human idea identity ideological indi Indian New Deal Indian schools individuality JC reel 32 John Collier Krupat labor Lakota land Lawrence Lawrence's living Luhan Mabel Dodge Luhan McNickle modern modernist multicultural Native American Native art Native cultures Navajo novel numbers Oliver La Farge photographs political Pratt primitive production protomulticultural Prucha psychological Pueblos puritans quoted race racial reform reservation RHPP Richard Henry Pratt romantic Santa Fe savage sentimental Sioux Sloan social socialist soul spiritual Standing Bear subjectivity Taos and Santa therapeutic tion tive traditional tribal tribes University Press viduality white man's workers writes wrote York
Popular passages
Page 17 - Geertz stated many years ago that "the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background...
Page 5 - It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail.
Page 5 - Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor ? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the Cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.