Angela Benkhadda

The negotiation of history is a dominant theme in Native American literatures as novels ranging from The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) by John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee) to Anishinaabe writer Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020) prove. However, there has been no systematic analysis of historical fiction by Indigenous North American authors. My dissertation project aims to fill this gap by investigating how Native American historical fiction navigates the epistemological tensions between Indigenous oral traditions, Euro-American conceptions of time and history, and postmodernism. My research is, furthermore, concerned with how literary representations of the past negotiate and intervene in present political discourses. My project tackles these two research questions through a diachronic approach that brings together works of Indigenous historical narration with political and legal texts, beginning with John Joseph Mathews’ Wah’kon-Tah: The Osage and The White Man’s Road (1929) to Louise Erdrich’s recent Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. The theoretical framework of my project builds on Indigenous and Native American studies as well as postcolonial theory – with a particular focus on recent scholarship on temporalities. It also takes into account new developments in the study of the historical novel that seek to move away from normative genre definitions and create theoretical space for the research of marginalized perspectives on history. By combining these different scholarly fields, my project aims to contribute to Native American studies and further current research on historical fiction.

in: Birgit Däwes, Bethany Webster-Parmentier (Hrsg.): Indigenous North American Futurities in Literature, Media, and Museums.

in: Alina Hofmann, Paul Labelle (Hrsg.): Opake Medien. Metakommentar und Störung als medienübergreifende Verfahren, Hannover: Wehrhahn 2023.

in: COPAS – Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies 23/2 (2022), pp. 80–100.