Native American Literature by Andrew Wiget, and American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography by Tom Colonnese and Louis Owens

This chapter focuses on the War of 1812 era and Native American resistance to US imperialism. It documents how the politics of enthusiasm, understood as religious fanaticism, was mobilized to discredit the rise of a multi-tribal Native American confederation and its right to resistance. Tenskwatawa, or the Shawnee Prophet, figures centrally in this cultural criticism, and the author analyzes available accounts of the Prophet and his brother Tecumseh, highlighting indigenous dissent as a performance of enthusiasm. Subsequently, the chapter turns to obscure War of 1812 novels (Samuel Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom, Don Pedro Casender’s The Lost Virgin of the South, and James Strange French’s Elkswatawa) in order to show how American literature absorbed Native American enthusiasms. In these novels it becomes apparent that a pro-American vision of the War of 1812 requires the white imagination to displace and appropriate Native America’s rightful struggle for independence. The chapter ends with a reading of the Pequot American Indian, William Apess, and his response to the War of 1812. Apess is unique for defending an indigenous enthusiastic politics in sympathy with the multi-tribal confederation, and he invents a Native American literature of enthusiasm in the process.

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A Practical Proposal to Use Venuti’s ‘Minoritizing Translation’ for Native American Literature

TranscUlturAl A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies ◽

10.21992/tc29380 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 83-100

Author(s):

Isis Herrero López

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

American Literature ◽

American Indian ◽

Present Article ◽

Recent Article ◽

Native American Literature ◽

Minor Literature ◽

Political Implications ◽

Practical Proposal ◽

A Minor

In a recent article, I argued that Native American literature, as a minor literature according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a great candidate for being translated in a minoritizing way, as proposed by Venuti. Since this literature is very popular in Spain –13 translations published in the 2010s–, I analysed the most recent translations of Sherman Alexie’s, Louise Erdrich’s and N. Scott Momaday’s novels and concluded that they were aimed at entertainment, at linguistic and syntactic fluency, and at over-refined stylistics. This kind of translation means, hence, the erasure of indigenous cultural and literary aspects from the target texts and the hiding of the socio-political implications of the source texts. In the present article, I insist on the idea that Venuti’s ‘minoritizing translation’ can be adapted to attend to the minor literature features of American Indian books and, consequently, to produce culturally and socio-politically engaged translations. After revising Venuti’s proposal and Tymoczko’s criticism on it, I present a brief description of the translations of works by Alexie, Erdrich, Momaday and Zitkala-Ša, all published during the 2010s. Then, I detail the precise strategies that would help to emphasize the specific characteristics of this literature, and I compare passages from the published translations with my alternative minoritizing translations.

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