Anticolonial Abstractions Race, Labor, and Literary Form in Native American and Asian American Modernism

Abstract

This dissertation studies what I describe as acts of anticolonial abstraction in fiction by Native American and Asian American authors published in the early decades of twentieth century. “Abstraction” as a key term in literary and cultural studies is strongly associated with processes and structures that cause death and harm, such as the material and discursive violence of colonialism, empire, racial capitalism, and cultures of spectacle and commodity consumption. It is also tied to the rarified aesthetics of canonical modernism, which use experiments with linguistic defamiliarization, perspective-shifting, and ellipsis to register the alienation of European subjects from the forces of modernity. Meanwhile, modern aesthetic formations like Primitivism, Orientalism, and certain strains of American regionalism, mined the arts and artifacts of colonized and subjected groups for abstract forms—the African mask, the Chinese ideogram, the Southwest textile pattern—to animate European and European American projects of cultural renewal. In a selection of literary texts by or about indigenous people, I locate an alternative strain of modernist literary invention in which marginalized figures create abstract forms and engage in activities and styles of narration I gather under the rubric of abstraction. By distinguishing colonial practices of material and cultural extraction from the agential forms of abstraction I identify in these texts and authors, I show how they deploy abstraction in service of their own aims, including individual and group survival and impulses towards literary innovation. Far from a disembodied departure from everyday life, anticolonial abstractions in these texts assert indigenous domesticities, crafts, and forms of agential movement and mobility as central to the story of modernism and modernity on the North American continent. I cultivate my reading methods through a set of fields and critical approaches rarely put into dialogue, drawing from studies of Native American and Indigenous literature, regional fiction, literary modernism, and Asian American literature. I also examine the initial publication venues of each work, from Christian magazines for women and children, to modernist little magazines, to the regional university press and the middlebrow Book-of-the-Month Club. I suggest that these authors’ innovations become most legible through their agential encounters with modern literary institutions, networks, and systems of value. The introduction and first two chapters focus on acts of anticolonial abstraction in works of short fiction: a Native woman entering the "deep abstraction" of intense thought in Gertrude Bonnin's American Indian Stories (1921); a Northwest Coast Indian mother crafting miniature copies of a family totem pole to sell as tourist souvenirs in a 1911 story by E. Pauline Johnson; and the circulation of the so-called "Alaska widow,” an image of devalued white femininity created in the wake of the northern gold rushes as reimagined the Chinese Canadian author Edith Eaton in 1909. The third chapter examines John Joseph Mathews’s significant but understudied novel of Osage history, Wah'Kon-Tah (1932), for its textual transfer of a white reservation agent from a biographical subject to the emptied-out, modernist figure of the automaton. The coda pursues the resonances of anticolonial abstraction in the Seneca artist Marie Watt’s “blanket stories” as forms that mesh modernist modularity with everyday materials. This project thus responds to Native studies scholar Philip J. Deloria’s invitation to attend to figures “native to modernism”: those whose practices of literary experimentation mark them as shaping the space and time of modernity.