A01=David J. Carlson
Author_David J. Carlson
Category=JBSL11
Category=NHK
Charles Eastman
colonial
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
identity
Indian Law
Indianness
legal
literary history
Revolutionary War
treaty-making
William Apess
Product details
- ISBN 9780252072666
- Weight: 399g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Nov 2005
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book is an exploration of how American Indian autobiographers' approaches to writing about their own lives have been impacted by American legal systems from the Revolutionary War until the 1920s. Historically, Native American autobiographers have written in the shadow of "Indian law," a nuanced form of natural law discourse with its own set of related institutions and forms (the reservation, the treaty, etc.). In Sovereign Selves, David J. Carlson develops a rigorously historicized argument about the relationship between the specific colonial model of "Indian" identity that was developed and disseminated through U.S. legal institutions, and the acts of autobiographical self-definition by the "colonized" Indians expected to fit that model.
Carlson argues that by drawing on the conventions of early colonial treaty-making, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian autobiographers sought to adapt and redefine the terms of Indian law as a way to assert specific property-based and civil rights. Focusing primarily on the autobiographical careers of two major writers (William Apess and Charles Eastman), Sovereign Selves traces the way that their sustained engagement with colonial legal institutions gradually enabled them to produce a new rhetoric of "Indianness."
David Carlson is an assistant professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino.
