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• Vonnegut Reinvented

  Rita Nandori

  Views:

  123

  Book review:

  McInnis, Gilbert. Kurt Vonnegut, Myth and Science in the Postmodern World. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2020. 184 pages. ISBN 978-1-4331-7435-3. Hb. CAD 42.08.

• Imagined Homeland: Inummariit as the Basis for the Concept of Inuit Nationhood

  Rita Nandori

  Views:

  152

  The Arctic is home to many distant and distinct Inuit communities and dialects. The strength of the Inuit originates in their being tethered to the same ancient narrative harkening back to common ancestral traditions, songs, and stories that characterize the Inummariit, the “real Inuk.” The wisdom of these traditions called quajimajatuqangit, or Inuit knowledge, is the key to creating nationhood among the Inuit via unikkausivut, sharing stories. This paper examines how affirming shared roots, common goals, and speaking with a united voice—the credo of the Circumpolar Council, the prime Inuit organization in the North—has helped establish an Inuit national identity for all Inuit living in several different regions and countries across the Arctic. In Canada, the creation of the semi-sovereign territory of Nunavut and the acknowledgement of the Inuit Nunangat, or homeland, have further aided the Inuit in redefining themselves. (RN)

• From Poverty to Assimilation: Thomas Jefferson on Native Americans as Indigent People

  Zoltán Vajda

  Views:

  290

  Thomas Jefferson has long been noted for his vested academic interest in Native Americans, whom he considered to be a doomed, yet, through assimilation, a redeemable race—who in his view were people living in poverty; an aspect of Jefferson’s vision of the indigenous peoples of North America which has so far been ignored. This essay therefore claims that Jefferson’s general concern with them was also fueled by his understanding of Native Americans as people whose way of life relegated them into the condition of indigence by definition—a state Jefferson wished to alleviate. Drawing on Jefferson’s ideas of political economy, combined with a perspective provided by early American poverty studies, I argue that his republican ideal of free-holding male household heads was also a key to his conception of Native American poverty as well as to his solution to it. In his view, gender roles and practices within the Native communities prevented male heads from adapting to the Euro-American ideals. In Jefferson’s eyes, women’s contribution to basic activities of sustenance, thus, rendered their spouses incapable of providing for their families by the Euro-American standard of the gender division of labor. He regarded them as indigents because of their actual mode of sustenance, but a desirable shift to white ways, Jefferson implied, held the promise for them to get out of destitution. (ZV)

• After the “Post,” in the Present: New Perspectives on Nationhood

  Judit Szathmári

  Views:

  309

  Review essay:

  Charles, Mark, and Soong-Chan Rah. Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2019. Print.

  Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge Advances in American History 8. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2018. Print.

• “Another spirit, other thoughts, another colouring”: Performances of Race in Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 From the New World

  Nathaniel Sikand-Youngs

  Views:

  225

  The Czech composer Antonín Dvořák wrote his Symphony No. 9 in E minor (From the New World) in 1893 while he served as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. In the work, he intended to portray the US and establish its musical vernacular. Dvořák believed that a truly American school of classical composition must evoke the character of its indigenous and folk music which he identified with Native American and African American styles. Through a musicological analysis, the essay offers cultural criticism of how the symphony represents these musical traditions and, in turn, the indigenous and black peoples who produced them. I argue that the symphony alludes to Native and black Americans in inaccurate and, at times, objectionable terms, but does so through a musical aesthetic that warrants a more nuanced conclusion about the racial content of the composition. (NS-Y)

• Black Flânerie, Non-White Soundscapes, and the Fantastic in Teju Cole’s Open City

  Dorottya Mózes

  Views:

  324

  This essay develops an alternative notion of Black flânerie, one that foregrounds the flâneur’s auditory experiences and practices in the city, explaining how sound patterns work as indexes of historical traumas such as slavery, colonialism, and indigenous dispossession. More specifically, it investigates how sound and space are connected and what these connections may reveal about acoustical and historical conditions of urban sites. Analyses advance readings of spaces as shadowed by sonic traces, echoes, afterlives, and memories, which point to the sedimentation of sound in geographic as well as psychic structures and ruptures and hence show how different soundscapes suggest different forms of relationality: alienation, rupture, intersection, connection, and transformation. Finally, it demonstrates how sound imagery—including music, dialects, noise, voices, and silence—functions to signal fantastic spaces and places, fantastic or speculative linkages in particular, and produces a version of the non-White fantastic. (DKM)

• Pocahontas Incarcerated: An Activist’s Account of Early Twentieth-Century Native America

  Judit Szathmári

  Views:

  66

  Book review:

  Ackley, Kristina, and Cristina Stanciu, eds. Laura Cornelius Kellogg: Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works. New York: Syracuse UP, 2015. xxviii + 301 pages. ISBN 978-0-8156-3390-7. Hb. Npr.

   

• The Success of Jewish Agricultural Colonies in Western Canada

  Eric Wilkinson

  Views:

  140

  This article assesses the history of Jewish agricultural settlements created in Western Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first settlements were founded following the 1881 Russian pogroms, at which time Canada’s Jewish community tried to resettle refugees in Western Canada. The result was the establishment of over a dozen farming colonies at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining the documentation produced by the colonists and the organizations that facilitated their settlement, it is possible to reconstruct the lives of the colonists in each community. This study investigates documents available for twelve different communities that span the Prairies. Settlers report several impediments to their success, including inexperience, poor soil, natural disaster, anti-Semitism, poor administration, and financial hardship. However, the decisive factor which brought an end to the colonies was upward social mobility. They were victims of their own success, unable to maintain their numbers as younger generations moved away, and parents joined them when they retired. The analysis of the farm colonies reveals the causes of their decline and provides grounds for re-evaluating their legacy. (EW)