| Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause In Reconstructing the Native South , Melanie Benson Taylor examines the diverse body of Native American literature in the contemporary U.S. South--literature written by the descendants of tribes who evaded Removal and have maintained ties with their southeastern homelands. In so doing Taylor advances a provocative, even counterintuitive claim: that the U.S. South and its Native American survivors have far more in common than mere geographical proximity. Both cultures have long been haunted by separate histories of loss and nostalgia, Taylor contends, and the moments when those experiences converge in explicit and startling ways have yet to be investigated by scholars. These convergences often bear the scars of protracted colonial antagonism, appropriation, and segregation, and they share preoccupations with land, sovereignty, tradition, dispossession, subjugation, purity, and violence. MELANIE BENSON TAYLOR is an assistant professor of English and Native American studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (both Georgia). |